The Ghost of a Model T and Other Stories (19 page)

He drove the engine crew and he drove himself, day after dying day, while the howling of the tubes and the thunder of the haywire Morrisons racked a man almost beyond endurance.

There was no such thing as sleep—only catnaps caught as one could catch them. There were no such things as meals, only food gulped on the run. And there was work, and worse than work were the watching and the waiting, the shoulders tensed against the stutter or the sudden screech of metal that would spell disaster.

Why, he wondered dully, did a man ever go to space? Why should one deliberately choose a job like this? Here in the engine room, with its cranky motors, it might be worse than elsewhere in the ship. But that didn't mean it wasn't bad. For throughout the ship stretched tension and discomfort and, above all, the dead, black fear of space itself, of what space could do to a ship and the men within it.

In some of the bigger, newer ships, conditions might be better, but not a great deal better. They still tranquilized the passengers and colonists who went out to the other planets—tranquilized them to quiet the worries, to make them more insensitive to discomfort, to prevent their breaking into panic.

But a crew you could not tranquilize. A crew must be wide-awake, with all its faculties intact. A crew had to sit and take it.

Perhaps the time would come when the ships were big enough, when the engines and the drives would be perfected, when Man had lost some of his fear of the emptiness of space—then it would be easier.

But that time might be far off. It was almost two hundred years now since his family had gone out, among the first colonists, to Mars.

If it were not that he was going home, he told himself, it would be beyond all tolerance and endurance. He could almost smell the cold, dry air of home—even in this place that reeked with other smells. He could look beyond the metal skin of the ship in which he rode and across the long dark miles and see the gentle sunset on the redness of the hills.

And in this he had an advantage over all the others. For without going home, he could not have stood it.

The days wore on and the engines held and the hope built up within him. And finally hope gave way to triumph.

And then came the day when the ship went mushing down through the thin, cold atmosphere and came in to a landing.

He reached out and pulled a switch and the engines rumbled to a halt. Silence came into the tortured steel that still was numb with noise.

He stood beside the engines, deafened by the silence, frightened by this alien thing that never made a sound.

He walked along the engines, with his hand sliding on their metal, stroking them as he would pet an animal, astonished and slightly angry at himself for finding in himself a queer, distorted quality of affection for them.

But why not? They had brought him home. He had nursed and pampered them, he had cursed them and watched over them, he had slept with them, and they had brought him home.

And that was more, he admitted to himself, than he had ever thought they would do.

He found that he was alone. The crew had gone swarming up the ladder as soon as he had pulled the switch. And now it was time that he himself was going.

But he stood there for a moment, in that silent room, as he gave the place one final visual check. Everything was all right. There was nothing to be done.

He turned and climbed the ladder slowly, heading for the port.

He found the captain standing in the port, and out beyond the port stretched the redness of the land.

“All the rest have gone except the purser,” said the captain. “I thought you'd soon be up. You did a fine job with the engines, Mr. Cooper. I'm glad you shipped with us.”

“It's my last run,” Cooper said, staring out at the redness of the hills. “Now I settle down.”

“That's strange,” said the captain. “I take it you're a Mars man.”

“I am. And I never should have left.”

The captain stared at him and said again: “That's strange.”

“Nothing strange,” said Cooper. “I –”

“It's my last run, too,” the captain broke in. “There'll be a new commander to take her back to Earth.”

“In that case,” Cooper offered, “I'll stand you a drink as soon as we get down.”

“I'll take you up on that. First we'll get our shots.”

They climbed down the ladder and walked across the field toward the spaceport buildings. Trucks went whining past them, heading for the ship, to pick up the unloaded cargo.

And now it was all coming back to Cooper, the way he had dreamed it in that shabby room on Earth—the exhilarating taste of the thinner, colder air, the step that was springier because of the lesser gravity, the swift and clean elation of the uncluttered, brave red land beneath a weaker sun.

Inside, the doctor waited for them in his tiny office.

“Sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “but you know the regulations.”

“I don't like it,” said the captain, “but I suppose it does make sense.”

They sat down in the chairs and rolled up their sleeves.

“Hang on,” the doctor told them. “It gives you quite a jolt.”

It did.

And it had before, thought Cooper, every time before. He should be used to it by now.

He sat weakly in the chair, waiting for the weakness and the shock to pass, and he saw the doctor, there behind his desk, watching them and waiting for them to come around to normal.

“Was it a rough trip?” the doctor finally asked.

“They all are rough,” the captain replied curtly.

Cooper shook his head. “This one was the worst I've ever known. Those engines …”

The captain said: “I'm sorry, Cooper. This time it was the truth. We were
really
carrying medicine. There
is
an epidemic. Mine was the only ship. I'd planned an overhaul, but we couldn't wait.”

Cooper nodded. “I remember now,” he said.

He stood up weakly and stared out the window at the cold, the alien, the forbidding land of Mars.

“I never could have made it,” he said flatly, “if I'd not been psychoed.”

He turned back to the doctor. “Will there ever be a time?”

The doctor nodded. “Someday, certainly. When the ships are better. When the race is more conditioned to space travel.”

“But this homesickness business—it gets downright brutal.”

“It's the only way,” the doctor declared. “We'd not have any spacemen if they weren't always going home.”

“That's right,” the captain said. “No man, myself included, could face that kind of beating unless it was for something more than money.”

Cooper looked out the window at the Martian sandscape and shivered. Of all the God-forsaken places he had ever seen!

He was a fool to be in space, he told himself, with a wife like Doris and two kids back home. He could hardly wait to see them.

And he knew the symptoms. He was getting homesick once again—but this time it was for Earth.

The doctor was taking a bottle out of his desk and pouring generous drinks into glasses for all three of them.

“Have a shot of this,” he said, “and let's forget about it.”

“As if we could remember,” said Cooper, laughing suddenly.

“After all,” the captain said, far too cheerfully, “we have to see it in the right perspective. It's nothing more than a condition of employment.”

City

“City” was written in 1944, and John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of
Astounding
, would accept it for publication only 16 days after receipt. However, few now realize that the version that appeared in the magazine, which is what is presented here, was altered slightly for its later publication in the book that bears its name. And although “City” was basically a reaction to World War II—and thus backward-looking, in a sense—it turned out, completely unexpectedly, to be the seed of a series of stories to which it would give its name—the kind of series we now call “future history”.

“City” is set in the world of 1990; and now, as I write this nearly twenty-five years beyond 1990, I wonder what Cliff would think of today's world. Was the lawn mower that Gramp resented so much the ancestor of Jenkins, the robot who finally became the star of the series?

—dww

Gramp Stevens sat in a lawn chair, watching the mower at work, feeling the warm, soft sunshine seep into his bones. The mower reached the edge of the lawn, clucked to itself like a contented hen, made a neat turn and trundled down another swath. The bag holding the clippings bulged.

Suddenly the mower stopped and clicked excitedly. A panel in its side snapped open and a cranelike arm reached out. Grasping steel fingers fished around in the grass, came up triumphantly with a stone clutched tightly, dropped the stone into a small container, disappeared back into the panel again. The lawn mower gurgled, purred on again, following its swath.

Gramp grumbled at it with suspicion.

“Some day,” he told himself, “that dadburned thing is going to miss a lick and have a nervous breakdown.”

He lay back in the chair and stared up at the sun-washed sky. A helicopter skimmed far overhead. From somewhere inside the house a radio came to life and a torturing crash of music poured out. Gramp, hearing it, shivered and hunkered lower in the chair.

Young Charlie was settling down for a twitch session. Dadburn the kid.

The lawn mower chuckled past and Gramp squinted at it maliciously.

“Automatic,” he told the sky. “Ever' blasted thing is automatic now. Getting so you just take a machine off in a corner and whisper in its ear and it scurries off to do the job.”

His daughter's voice came to him out the window, pitched to carry above the music.

“Father!”

Gramp stirred uneasily. “Yes, Betty.”

“Now, father, you see you move when that lawn mower gets to you. Don't try to out-stubborn it. After all, it's only a machine. Last time you just sat there and made it cut around you. I never saw the beat of you.”

He didn't answer, letting his head nod a bit, hoping she would think he was asleep and let him be.

“Father,” she shrilled, “did you hear me?”

He saw it was no good. “Sure, I heard you,” he told her. “I was just fixing to move.”

He rose slowly to his feet, leaning heavily on his cane. Might make her feel sorry for the way she treated him when she saw how old and feeble he was getting. He'd have to be careful, though. If she knew he didn't need the cane at all, she'd be finding jobs for him to do and, on the other hand, if he laid it on too thick, she'd be having that fool doctor in to pester him again.

Grumbling, he moved the chair out into that portion of the lawn that had been cut. The mower, rolling past, chortled at him fiendishly.

“Some day,” Gramp told it, “I'm going to take a swipe at you and bust a gear or two.”

The mower hooted at him and went serenely down the lawn.

From somewhere down the grassy street came a jangling of metal, a stuttered coughing.

Gramp, ready to sit down, straightened up and listened.

The sound came more clearly, the rumbling backfire of a balky engine, the clatter of loose metallic parts.

“An automobile!” yelped Gramp. “An automobile, by cracky!”

He started to gallop for the gate, suddenly remembered that he was feeble and subsided to a rapid hobble.

“Must be that crazy Ole Johnson,” he told himself. “He's the only one left that's got a car. Just too dadburned stubborn to give it up.”

It was Ole.

Gramp reached the gate in time to see the rusty, dilapidated old machine come bumping around the corner, rocking and chugging along the unused street. Steam hissed from the overheated radiator and a cloud of blue smoke issued from the exhaust, which had lost its muffler five years or more ago.

Ole sat stolidly behind the wheel, squinting his eyes, trying to duck the roughest places, although that was hard to do, for weeds and grass had overrun the streets and it was hard to see what might be underneath them.

Gramp waved his cane.

“Hi, Ole,” he shouted.

Ole pulled up, setting the emergency brake. The car gasped, shuddered, coughed, died with a horrible sigh.

“What you burning?” asked Gramp.

“Little bit of everything,” said Ole. “Kerosene, some old tractor oil I found out in a barrel, some rubbing alcohol.”

Gramp regarded the fugitive machine with forthright admiration. “Them was the days,” he said. “Had one myself used to be able to get a hundred miles an hour out of.”

“Still O.K.,” said Ole, “if you only could find the stuff to run them or get the parts to fix them. Up to three, four years ago I used to be able to get enough gasoline, but ain't seen none for a long time now. Quit making it, I guess. No use having gasoline, they tell me, when you have atomic power.”

“Sure,” said Gramp. “Guess maybe that's right, but you can't smell atomic power. Sweetest thing I know, the smell of burning gasoline. These here helicopters and other gadgets they got took all the romance out of traveling, somehow.”

He squinted at the barrels and baskets piled in the back seat.

“Got some vegetables?” he asked.

“Yup,” said Ole. “Some sweet corn and early potatoes and a few baskets of tomatoes. Thought maybe I could sell them.”

Gramp shook his head. “You won't, Ole. They won't buy them. Folks has got the notion that this new hydroponics stuff is the only garden sass that's fit to eat. Sanitary, they say, and better flavored.”

“Wouldn't give a hoot in a tin cup for all they grow in them tanks they got,” Ole declared, belligerently. “Don't taste right to me, somehow. Like I tell Martha, food's got to be raised in the soil to have any character.”

He reached down to turn over the ignition switch.

“Don't know as it's worth trying to get the stuff to town,” he said, “the way they keep the roads. Or the way they don't keep them, rather. Twenty years ago the state highway out there was a strip of good concrete and they kept it patched and plowed it every winter. Did anything, spent any amount of money to keep it open. And now they just forgot about it. The concrete's all broken up and some of it has washed out. Brambles are growing in it. Had to get out and cut away a tree that fell across it one place this morning.”

“Ain't it the truth,” agreed Gramp.

The car exploded into life, coughing and choking. A cloud of dense blue smoke rolled out from under it. With a jerk it stirred to life and lumbered down the road.

Gramp clumped back to his chair and found it dripping wet. The automatic mower, having finished its cutting job, had rolled out the hose, was sprinkling the lawn.

Muttering venom, Gramp stalked around the corner of the house and sat down on the bench beside the back porch. He didn't like to sit there, but it was the only place he was safe from the hunk of machinery out in the front.

For one thing, the view from the bench was slightly depressing, fronting as it did on street after street of vacant, deserted houses and weed-grown, unkempt yards.

It had one advantage, however. From the bench he could pretend he was slightly deaf and not hear the twitch music the radio was blaring out.

A voice called from the front yard.

“Bill! Bill, where be you?”

Gramp twisted around.

“Here I am, Mark. Back of the house. Hiding from that dadburned mower.”

Mark Bailey limped around the corner of the house, cigarette threatening to set fire to his bushy whiskers.

“Bit early for the game, ain't you?” asked Gramp.

“Can't play no game today,” said Mark.

He hobbled over and sat down beside Gramp on the bench.

“We're leaving,” he said.

Gramp whirled on him. “You're leaving!”

“Yeah. Moving out into the country. Lucinda finally talked Herb into it. Never gave him no peace, I guess. Said everyone was moving away to one of them nice country estates and she didn't see no reason why we couldn't.”

Gramp gulped. “Where to?”

“Don't rightly know,” said Mark. “Ain't been there myself. Up north some place. Up on one of the lakes. Got ten acres of land. Lucinda wanted a hundred, but Herb put down his foot and said ten was enough. After all, one city lot was enough for all these years.”

“Betty was pestering Johnny, too,” said Gramp, “but he's holding out against her. Says he simply can't do it. Says it wouldn't look right, him the secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and all, if he went moving away from the city.”

“Folks are crazy,” Mark declared. “Plumb crazy.”

“That's a fact,” Gramp agreed. “Country crazy, that's what they are. Look across there.”

He waved his hand at the streets of vacant houses. “Can remember the time when those places were as pretty a bunch of homes as you ever laid your eyes on. Good neighbors, they were. Women ran across from one back door to another to trade recipes. And the men folks would go out to cut the grass and pretty soon the mowers would all be sitting idle and the men would be ganged up, chewing the fat. Friendly people, Mark. But look at it now.”

Mark stirred uneasily. “Got to be getting back, Bill. Just sneaked over to let you know we were lighting out. Lucinda's got me packing. She'd be sore if she knew I'd run out.”

Gramp rose stiffly and held out his hand. “I'll be seeing you again? You be over for one last game?”

Mark shook his head. “Afraid not, Bill.”

They shook hands awkwardly, abashed. “Sure will miss them games,” said Mark.

“Me, too,” said Gramp. “I won't have nobody once you're gone.”

“So long, Bill,” said Mark.

“So long,” said Gramp.

He stood and watched his friend hobble around the house, felt the cold claw of loneliness reach out and touch him with icy fingers. A terrible loneliness. The loneliness of age—of age and the outdated. Fiercely, Gramp admitted it. He was outdated. He belonged to another age. He had outstripped his time, lived beyond his years.

Eyes misty, he fumbled for the cane that lay against the bench, slowly made his way toward the sagging gate that opened onto the deserted street back of the house.

The years had moved too fast. Years that had brought the family plane and helicopter, leaving the auto to rust in some forgotten place, the unused roads to fall into disrepair. Years that had virtually wiped out the tilling of the soil with the rise of hydroponics. Years that had brought cheap land with the disappearance of the farm as an economic unit, had sent city people scurrying out into the country where each man, for less than the price of a city lot, might own broad acres. Years that had revolutionized the construction of homes to a point where families simply walked away from their old homes to the new ones that could be bought, custom-made, for less than half the price of a prewar structure and could be changed at small cost, to accommodate need of additional space or merely a passing whim.

Gramp sniffed. Houses that could be changed each year, just like one would shift around the furniture. What kind of living was that?

He plodded slowly down the dusty path that was all that remained of what a few years before had been a busy residential street. A street of ghosts, Gramp told himself—of furtive, little ghosts that whispered in the night. Ghosts of playing children, ghosts of upset tricycles and canted coaster wagons. Ghosts of gossiping housewives. Ghosts of shouted greetings. Ghosts of flaming fireplaces and chimneys smoking of a winter night.

Little puffs of dust rose around his feet and whitened the cuffs of his trousers.

There was the old Adams place across the way. Adams had been mighty proud of it, he remembered. Gray field stone front and picture windows. Now the stone was green with creeping moss and the broken windows gaped with ghastly leer. Weeds choked the lawn and blotted out the stoop. An elm tree was pushing its branches against the gable. Gramp could remember the day Adams had planted that elm tree.

For a moment he stood there in the grass-grown street, feet in the dust, both hands clutching the curve of his cane, eyes closed.

Through the fog of years he heard the cry of playing children, the barking of Conrad's yapping pooch from down the street. And there was Adams, stripped to the waist, plying the shovel, scooping out the hole, with the elm tree, roots wrapped in burlap, lying on the lawn.

May, 1946. Forty-four years ago. Just after he and Adams had come home from the war together.

Footsteps padded in the dust and Gramp, startled, opened his eyes.

Before him stood a young man. A man of thirty, perhaps. Maybe a bit less.

“Good morning,” said Gramp.

“I hope,” said the young man, “that I didn't startle you.”

“You saw me standing here,” asked Gramp, “like a danged fool, with my eyes shut?”

The young man nodded.

“I was remembering,” said Gramp.

“You live around here?”

“Just down the street. The last one in this part of the city.”

“Perhaps you can help me then.”

“Try me,” said Gramp.

The young man stammered. “Well, you see, it's like this. I'm on a sort of … well, you might call it a sentimental pilgrimage –”