No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) (35 page)

He took his hand off the key and sat back. A terrible coldness came upon him—a coldness and a hardness. The fear was gone, the panic gone; all that remained was the coldness and the hardness. He unlatched the door and pushed it open. Deliberately, he stepped down to the ground and moved away from the camper. The windmill, freighted with its monsters, loomed directly overhead. The massed humped shapes blocked the track. Heads, if they were heads, moved back and forth. There was the sense of twitching tails, although he could see no tails. The whistling filled the universe, shrill, insistent, unending. The windmill blades, unhampered by the climbing shapes, clattered in the wind.

Thomas moved forward. “I’m coming through,” he said, aloud. “Make way for me. I am coming through.” And it seemed to him that as he walked slowly forward, he was walking to a certain beat, to a drum that only he could hear. Startled, he realized that the beat he was walking to was the creaking of that rocking chair in the old New England house.

Illogic said to him,
It’s all that you can do. It’s the only thing to do. You cannot run, to be pulled down squealing. It’s the one thing a man can do.

He walked slowly, but deliberately, marching to the slow, deliberate creaking of the rocking chair. “Make way,” he said. “I am the thing that came after you.”

And they seemed to say to him, through the shrill whistling of the well, the clatter of the windmill blades, the creaking of the chair,
Pass, strange one. For you carry with you the talisman we gave our people. You have with you the token of your faith.

Not my faith, he thought. Not my talisman. That’s not the reason you do not dare to touch me. I swallowed no gizzard stone.

But you are brother, they told him, to the one who did.

They parted, pulled aside to clear the track for him, to make way for him. He glanced to neither left nor right, pretending they were not there at all, although he knew they were. He could smell the rancid, swamp-smell of them. He could feel the presence of them. He could feel the reaching out, as if they meant to stroke him, to pet him as one might a dog or cat, but staying the touch before it came upon him.

He walked the track and left them behind, grouped in their humpiness all about the well. He left them deep in time. He left them in another world and headed for his own, striding, still slowly, slow enough so they would not think that he was running from them, but a bit faster than he had before, down the track that bisected Parker’s Ridge.

He put his hand into the pocket of the jacket, his fingers gripping the greasy smoothness of the gizzard stone. The creaking of the chair still was in his mind and he still marched to it, although it was growing fainter now.

Brother, he thought, they said brother to me. And indeed I am. All life on earth is brother and sister and each of us can carry, if we wish, the token of our faith.

He said aloud, to that ancient dinosaur that had died so long ago among the tumbled boulders, “Brother, I am glad to know you. I am glad I found you. Glad to carry the token of your faith.”

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2016 the Estate of Clifford D. Simak

All stories reprinted by permission of the Estate of Clifford D. Simak.

“No Life of Their Own” © 1959 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. © 1987 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Galaxy Magazine
, v. 17, no. 6, August, 1959.

“Spaceship in a Flask” © 1941 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. © 1969 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Astounding Science Fiction
, v. 27, no. 5, July, 1941.

“The Loot of Time” © 1938 by Better Publications, Inc. © 1966 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Thrilling Wonder Stories
, v. 12, no. 3, December, 1938.

“Huddling Place” © 1944 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. © 1972 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Astounding Science Fiction
, v. 33, no. 5, July, 1944.

“To Walk a City’s Street” © 1972 by Lancer Books, Inc. © 2000 by the Estate of Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Infinity Three
.

“Cactus Colts” © 1944 by Real Adventures Publishing Co., Inc. © 1972 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Lariat Story Magazine
, v. 14, no. 2, July, 1944.

“Message from Mars” © 1943 by Love Romances Publishing Co., Inc. © 1971 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Planet Stories
, v. 2, no. 4, Fall, 1943.

“Party Line” © 1978 by Charter Communications, Inc. Originally published in
Destinies
, v. 1, no. 1, Nov./Dec., 1978.

“A Hero Must Not Die” © 1943 by Columbia Publications, Inc. © 1971 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Sky Raiders
, v. 1, no. 4, June, 1943.

“The Space Beasts” © 1940 by Fictioneers, Inc. © 1968 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Astonishing Stories
, v. 1, no. 2, April, 1940.

“Contraption” © 1953 by Ballantine Books, Inc. © 1981 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Star Science Fiction Stories
, no. 1, ed. by Frederik Pohl.

“The Whistling Well” © 1980 by Clifford D. Simak. Originally published in
Dark Forces
, ed. by Kirby McCauley, Viking Press, 1980.

Introduction copyright © 2015 by David W. Wixon

Cover design by Jason Gabbert

978-1-5040-2317-7

Published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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