Filled with wonder, a wonder that was fading, that would be entirely faded before he reached the city, Webb started walking up the path.
Wampus Smith and Lars Nelson came to the hill many days later. They came on foot because the wilderness wagon had broken down. They came without food except the little food they could kill along the way and they came with no more than a few drops of water sloshing in their canteens and there was no water to be found.
There, a short distance from the foot of the hill, they found the sun-dried mummy of a man face downward on the sand and when they turned him over they saw who he was.
Wampus stared across the body at Lars.
“How did he get here?” he croaked.
“I don’t know,” said Lars. “He never could have made it, not knowing the country and on foot. And he wouldn’t have traveled this way anyhow. He would have headed east, back to the settlements.”
They pawed through his clothing and found nothing. But they took his gun, for the charges in their own were running very low.
“What’s the use,” said Lars. “We can’t make it, Wampus.”
“We can try,” said Wampus.
Above the hill a mirage flickered…a city with shining turrets and dizzy pinnacles and rows of trees and fountains that flashed with leaping water. To their ears came the sound, or seemed to come, the sound of many bells.
Wampus spat with lips that were cracked and dried, spat with no saliva in his mouth.
“Them damn mirages,” he said. “They drive a man half crazy.”
“They seem so close,” said Lars. “So close and real. As if they were someplace else and were trying to break through.”
Wampus spat again. “Let’s get going,” he said.
The two men turned toward the east and as they moved, they left staggering, uneven tracks through the sand of Mars.
The Autumn Land
Cliff Simak once called this story one of the few he wrote to order: he’d been asked for a story that could appear in the October 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as a celebration of Cliff’s concurrent appearance as Guest of Honor at that year’s World Science Fiction Convention. And it would become one of his favorites among his stories. But it is, in a way, an extension of those Simak stories that featured people trying to find a way to flee some sort of societal collapse—and it’s haunted.
He sat on the porch, in the rocking chair, with the loose board creaking as he rocked. Across the street the old white-haired lady cut a bouquet of chrysanthemums in the never-ending autumn. Where he could see between the ancient houses to the distant woods and wastelands, a soft Indian-summer blue lay upon the land. The entire village was soft and quiet, as old things often are—a place constructed for a dreaming mind rather than a living being. It was an hour too early for his other old and shaky neighbor to come fumbling down the grass-grown sidewalk, tapping the bricks with his seeking cane. And he would not hear the distant children at their play until dusk had fallen—if he heard them then. He did not always hear them.
There were books to read, but he did not want to read them. He could go into the backyard and spade and rake the garden once again, reducing the soil to a finer texture to receive the seed when it could be planted—if it ever could be planted—but there was slight incentive in the further preparation of a seed bed against a spring that never came. Earlier, much earlier, before he knew about the autumn and the spring, he had mentioned garden seeds to the Milkman, who had been very much embarrassed.
He had walked the magic miles and left the world behind in bitterness and when he first had come here had been content to live in utter idleness, to be supremely idle and to feel no guilt or shame at doing absolutely nothing or as close to absolutely nothing as a man was able. He had come walking down the autumn street in the quietness and the golden sunshine, and the first person that he saw was the old lady who lived across the street. She had been waiting at the gate of her picket fence as if she had known he would be coming, and she had said to him, “You’re a new one come to live with us. There are not many come these days. That is your house across the street from me, and I know we’ll be good neighbors.” He had reached up his hand to doff his hat to her, forgetting that he had no hat. “My name is Nelson Rand,” he’d told her. “I am an engineer. I will try to be a decent neighbor.” He had the impression that she stood taller and straighter than she did, but old and bent as she might be there was a comforting graciousness about her. “You will please come in,” she said. “I have lemonade and cookies. There are other people there, but I shall not introduce them to you.” He waited for her to explain why she would not introduce him, but there was no explanation, and he followed her down the time-mellowed walk of bricks with great beds of asters and chrysanthemums, a mass of color on either side of it.
In the large, high-ceilinged living room, with its bay windows forming window seats, filled with massive furniture from another time and with a small blaze burning in the fireplace, she had shown him to a seat before a small table to one side of the fire and had sat down opposite him and poured the lemonade and passed the plate of cookies.
“You must pay no attention to them,” she had told him. “They are all dying to meet you, but I shall not humor them.”
It was easy to pay no attention to them, for there was no one there.
“The Major, standing over there by the fireplace,” said his hostess, “with his elbow on the mantel, a most ungainly pose if you should ask me, is not happy with my lemonade. He would prefer a stronger drink. Please, Mr. Rand, will you not taste my lemonade? I assure you it is good. I made it myself. I have no maid, you see, and no one in the kitchen. I live quite by myself and satisfactorily, although my friends keep dropping in, sometimes more often than I like.”
He tasted the lemonade, not without misgivings, and to his surprise it was lemonade and was really good, like the lemonade he had drunk when a boy at Fourth of July celebrations and at grade school picnics, and had never tasted since.
“It is excellent,” he said.
“The lady in blue,” his hostess said, “sitting in the chair by the window, lived here many years ago. She and I were friends, although she moved away some time ago and I am surprised that she comes back, which she often does. The infuriating thing is that I cannot remember her name, if I ever knew it. You don’t know it, do you?”
“I am afraid I don’t.”
“Oh, of course, you wouldn’t. I had forgotten. I forget so easily these days. You are a new arrival.”
He had sat through the afternoon and drank her lemonade and eaten her cookies, while she chattered on about her nonexistent guests. It was only when he had crossed the street to the house she had pointed out as his, with her standing on the stoop and waving her farewell, that he realized she had not told him her name. He did not know it even now.
How long had it been? he wondered, and realized he didn’t know. It was this autumn business. How could a man keep track of time when it was always autumn?
It all had started on that day when he’d been driving across Iowa, heading for Chicago. No, he reminded himself, it had started with the thinnesses, although he had paid little attention to the thinnesses to begin with. Just been aware of them, perhaps as a strange condition of the mind, or perhaps an unusual quality to the atmosphere and light. As if the world lacked a certain solidity that one had come to expect, as if one were running along a mystic borderline between here and somewhere else.