City by Clifford D. Simak
“Surely,” said Jenkins, “even ants have the right to build.”
“But they’re building too fast. They’ll push us off the Earth. Another thousand years or so and they’ll cover the whole Earth if they keep on building at the rate they’ve been.”
“And you have no place to go? That’s what worries you.”
“Yes, we have a place to go. Many places. All the other worlds. The cobbly worlds.”
Jenkins nodded gravely. “I was in a cobbly world. The first world after this. I took some websters there five thousand years ago. I just came back tonight. And I know the way you feel. No other world is home. I’ve hungered for the Earth for almost every one of those five thousand years. I came back to Webster House and I found Archie there. He told me about the ants and so I came up here. I hope you do not mind.”
“We are glad you came,” said Homer, softly.
“Those ants,” said Jenkins. “I suppose you want to stop them.”
Homer nodded his head.
“There is a way,” said Jenkins. “I know there is a way. The websters had a way if I could just remember. But it’s so long ago. And it’s a simple way, I know. A very simple way.”
His hands came up and scraped back and forth across his chin.
“What are you doing that for?” Archie asked.
“Eh?”
“Rubbing your face that way. What do you do it for?”
Jenkins dropped his hand. “Just a habit, Archie. A webster gesture! A way they had of thinking. I picked it up from them.”
“Does it help you think?”
“Well, maybe. Maybe not. It seemed to help the websters. Now what would a webster do in a case like this? The websters could help us. I know they could…”
“The websters in the cobbly world,” said Homer.
Jenkins shook his head. “There aren’t any websters there.”
“But you said you took some back.”
“I know. But they aren’t there now. I’ve been alone in the cobbly world for almost four thousand years.”
“Then there aren’t websters anywhere. The rest went to Jupiter. Andrew told me that. Jenkins, where is Jupiter?”
“Yes, there are,” said Jenkins. “There are some websters left, I mean. Or there used to be. A few left at Geneva.”
“It won’t be easy,” Homer said. “Not even for a Webster. Those ants are smart. Archie told you about the flea he found.”
“It wasn’t any flea,” said Archie.
“Yes, he told me,” Jenkins said. “Said it got into Hezekiah.”
“Not onto,” Homer told them. “Into is the word. It wasn’t a flea…it was a robot, a tiny robot. It drilled a hole in Hezekiah’s skull and got into his brain. It sealed the hole behind it.”
“And what is Hezekiah doing now?”
“Nothing,” said Homer. “But we are pretty sure what he will do as soon as the ant robot gets the setup fixed. He’ll get the Call. He’ll get the call to go and work on the Building.”
Jenkins nodded. “Taking over,” he said. “They can’t do a job like that themselves, so they take control of things that can.”
He lifted his hand again and scraped it across his chin.
“I wonder if Joe knew,” he mumbled. “When he played god to the ants I wonder if he knew.”
But that was ridiculous. Joe never could have known. Even a mutation like Joe could not have looked twelve thousand years ahead.
So long ago, thought Jenkins. So many things have happened. Bruce Webster was just starting to experiment with dogs, had no more than dreamed his dream of talking, thinking dogs that would go down the path of destiny paw in hand with Man…not knowing then that Man within a few short centuries would scatter to the four winds of eternity and leave the Earth to robot and to dog. Not knowing then that even the name of Man would be forgotten in the dust of years, that the race would come to be known by the name of a single family.
And yet, thought Jenkins, if it was to be any family, the Websters were the ones. I can remember them as if it were yesterday. Those were the days when I thought of myself as a Webster, too.
Lord knows, I tried to be. I did the best I could. I stood by the Webster dogs when the race of men had gone and finally I took the last bothersome survivors of that madcap race into another world to clear the way for Dogs…so that the Dogs could fashion the Earth in the way they planned.
And now even those last bothersome survivors have gone…some place, somewhere…I wish that I could know. Escaped into some fantasy of the human mind. And the men on Jupiter are not even men, but something else. And Geneva is shut off…blocked off from the world.
Although it can’t be farther away or blocked more tightly than the world from which I came. If only I could learn how it was I traveled from the exile cobbly world back to Webster House…then, maybe, perhaps, somehow or other, I could reach Geneva.
A new power, he told himself. A new ability. A thing that grew upon me without my knowing that it grew. A thing that every man and every robot…and perhaps every dog…could have if he but knew the way.
Although it may be my body that made it possible…this body that the Dogs gave me on my seven thousandth birthday. A body that has more than any body of flesh and blood has ever quite attained. A body that can know what a bear is thinking or a fox is dreaming, that can feel the happy little mouse thoughts running in the grass.
Wish fulfillment. That might be it. The answer to the strange, illogical yearnings for things that seldom are and often cannot be. But all of which are possible if one can grow or develop or graft onto oneself the new ability that directs the mind and body to the fulfillment of the wish.
I walked the hill each day, he remembered. Walked there because I could not stay away, because the longing was so strong, steeling myself against looking too closely, for there were differences I did not wish to see.
I walked there a million times and it took that many times before the power within me was strong enough to take me back.
For I was trapped. The word, the thought, the concept that took me into the cobbly world was a one way ticket and while it took me there it could not take me back. But there was another way, a way I did not know. That even now I do not know.
“You said there was a way,” urged Homer.
“A way?”
“Yes, a way to stop the ants.”
Jenkins nodded. “I am going to find out. I’m going to Geneva.”
Jon Webster awoke.
And this is strange, he thought, for I said eternity.
I was to sleep forever and forever has no end.
All else was mist and the grayness of sleep forgetfulness, but this much stood out with mind-sharp clarity. Eternity, and this was not eternity.
A word ticked at his mind, like feeble tapping on a door that was far away.
He lay and listened to the tapping and the word became two words…words that spoke his name:
“Jon Webster. Jon Webster.” On and on, on and on. Two words tapping at his brain.
“Jon Webster.”
“Jon Webster.”
“Yes,” said Webster’s brain and the words stopped and did not come again.
Silence and the thinning of the mists of forgetfulness. And the trickling back of memory. One thing at a time.
There was a city and the name of the city was Geneva.
Men lived in the city, but men without a purpose.
The Dogs lived outside the city…in the whole world outside the city. The Dogs had purpose and a dream.
Sara climbed the hill to take a century of dreams.
And I…I, thought Jon Webster, climbed the hill and asked for eternity. This is not eternity.
“This is Jenkins, Jon Webster.”
“Yes, Jenkins,” said Jon Webster, and yet he did not say it, not with lip and tongue and throat, for he felt the fluid that pressed around his body inside its cylinder, fluid that fed him and kept him from dehydrating. Fluid that sealed his lips and eyes a
“Yes, Jenkins,” said Webster, speaking with his mind. “I remember you. I remember you now. You were with the family from the very first. You helped us teach the Dogs. You stayed with them when the family was no more.”
“I am still with them,” said Jenkins.
“I sought eternity,” said Webster. “I closed the city and sought eternity.”
“We often wondered,” Jenkins told him. “Why did you close the city?”
“The Dogs,” said Webster’s mind. “The Dogs had to have their chance. Man would have spoiled their chance.”
“The dogs are doing well,” said Jenkins.
“But the city is open now?”
“No, the city still is closed.”
“But you are here.”
“Yes, but I’m the only one who knows the way. And there will be no others. Not for a long time, anyway.”
“Time,” said Webster. “I had forgotten time. How long is it, Jenkins.”
“Since you closed the city? Ten thousand years or so.”
“And there are others?”
“Yes, but they are sleeping,”
“And the robots? The robots still keep watch?”
“The robots still keep watch.”
Webster lay quietly and a peace came upon his mind. The city still was closed and the last of men were sleeping. The Dogs were doing well and the robots stayed on watch.
“You should not have wakened me,” he said. “You should have let me sleep.”
“There was a thing I had to know. I knew it once, but I have forgotten and it is very simple. Simple and yet terribly important.”
Webster chuckled in his brain. “What is it, Jenkins?”
“It’s about ants,” said Jenkins. “Ants used to trouble men. What did you do about it?”
“Why, we poisoned them,” said Webster.
Jenkins gasped. “Poisoned them!”
“Yes,” said Webster. “A very simple thing. We used a base of syrup, sweet, to attract the ants. And we put poison in it, a poison that was deadly to ants. But we did not put in enough of it to kill them right away. A slow poison, you see, so they would have time to carry it to the nest. That way we killed many instead of just two or three.”
Silence hummed in Webster’s head…the silence of no thought, no word.
“Jenkins,” he said. “Jenkins, are you…”
“Yes, Jon Webster, I am here.”
“That is all you want?”
“That is all I want.”
“I can go to sleep again.”
“Yes, Jon Webster. Go to sleep again.”
Jenkins stood upon the hilltop and felt the first rough fore-running wind of winter whine across the land. Below him the slope that ran down to the river was etched in black and gray with the leafless skeletons of trees.
To the northeast rose the shadow-shape, the cloud of evil omen that was called the Building. A growing thing spawned in the mind of ants, built for what purpose and to what end no thing but an ant could even closely guess.
But there was a way to deal with ants.
The human way.
The way Jon Webster had told him after ten thousand years of sleep. A simple way and a fundamental way, a brutal, but efficient way. You took some syrup, sweet, so the ants would like it, and you put some poison in it…slow poison so it wouldn’t work too fast.
The simple way of poison, Jenkins said. The very simple way.
Except it called for chemistry and the Dogs knew no chemistry.
Except it called for killing and there was no killing.
Not even fleas, and the Dogs were pestered plenty by the fleas. Not even ants…and the ants threatened to dispossess the animals of the world they called their birthplace.
There had been no killing for five thousand years or more. The idea of killing had been swept from the minds of things.
And it is better that way, Jenkins told himself. Better that one should lose a world than go back to killing.
He turned slowly and went down the hill.
Homer would be disappointed, he told himself.
Terribly disappointed when he found the websters had no way of dealing with the ants…
Bonus short-story
This Epilogue was written 21 years after the other eight stories of City and first published in Astounding: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology edited by Harry Harrison in November 1973. It is reproduced here as first published.
* * *
EPILOG
by Clifford D. Simak
* * *
When Harry Harrison suggested I write a final City story for this memorial volume, I found myself instinctively shying away from it. Over the years a writer’s perspectives and viewpoints shift and his techniques change. I was fairly certain that in the thirty years since the tales were written I had probably traded for other writing tools the tools that I had used to give them the texture that served to distinguish them from my other work. Yet I realized that if I were to write a story for this book it should be a City story, for those stories were more deeply rooted in the old Astounding era than anything I had ever done.
The eight previous stories, with one exception, were published in John Campbell’s Astounding and told the story of the Webster family, the Webster robots and dogs. The tales recounted the breakdown of the city, the development of the Dog civilization by the Websters, the launching of the Ant society by the mad mutant, Joe. Finally, in order not to interfere with the culture being developed by the Dogs, the Websters left their old ancestral home. Staying behind, however, was the ancient robot, Jenkins, who served as mentor for the Dogs until they too went to one of the alternate Earths when the Ants began taking over.
The other stories recorded the saga of the Websters and the Dogs. This final tale is Jenkins’ story. It also is the last story I shall ever write for John. It is my hope it can stand as a small tribute to a man who deserves a much larger one and who was a greater friend to all of us than we may have known.
THINGS HAPPENED all at once on that single day, although what day it might have been is not known, for Jenkins…
As Jenkins walked across the meadow, the Wall came tumbling down…
Jenkins sat on the patio of Webster House and remembered that long-gone day when the man from Geneva had come back to Webster House and had told a little Dog that Jenkins was a Webster, too. And that, Jenkins told himself, had been a day of pride for him…
Jenkins walked across the meadow to commune with the little meadow mice, to become one with them and run for a time with them in the tunnels they had constructed in the grass. Although there was not much satisfaction in it. The mice were stupid things, unknowing and uncaring, but there was a certain warmth to them, a quiet sort of security and well-being, since they lived quite alone in the meadow world and there was no danger and no threat. There was nothing left to threaten them. They were all there were, aside from certain insects and worms that were fodder for the mice.
In time past, Jenkins recalled, he had often wondered why the mice had stayed behind when all the other animals had gone to join the Dogs in one of the cobbly worlds. They could have gone, of course. The Dogs could have taken them, but there had been no wish in them to go. Perhaps they had been satisfied with where they were; perhaps they had a sense of home too strong to let them go.
The mice and I, thought Jenkins. For he could have gone as well. He could go even now if he wished to go. He could have gone at any time at all. But like the mice, he had not gone, but stayed. He could not leave Webster House. Without it, he was only half a being.
So he had stayed and Webster House still stood. Although it would not have stood, he told himself, if it had not been for him. He had kept it clean and neat; he had patched it up. When a stone began to crumble, he had quarried and shaped another and had carefully replaced it, and while it may for a while have seemed new and alien to the house, time took care of that—the wind and sun and weather and the creeping moss and lichens.
For the Ants now held the world. They had made of the world one building, or so he had presumed, although he could not really know. But so far as he did know, so far as his robotic senses reached (and they reached far), there was nothing but the great senseless building that the Ants had built. Although to call it senseless, he reminded himself, was not entirely fair. There was no way of knowing what purpose it might serve. There was no way one might guess what purpose the Ants might have in mind.
The Ants had enclosed the world, but had stopped short of Webster House, and why they had done that there was no hint at all. They had built around it, making Webster House and its adjoining acres a sort of open courtyard within the confines of the building—a five-mile circle centered on the hill where Webster House still stood.
Jenkins walked across the meadow in the autumn sunshine, being very careful where he placed his feet for fear of harming mice. Except for the mice, he thought, he was alone, and he might almost as well have been alone, for the mice were little help. The Websters were gone and the Dogs and other animals. The robots gone as well, some of them long since having disappeared into the Ants’ building to help the Ants carry out their project, the others blasting for the stars. By this time, Jenkins thought, they should have gotten where they were headed for. They all had been long gone, and now he wondered, for the first time in many ages, how long it might have been. He found he did not know and now would never know, for there had been that far-past moment when he had wiped utterly from his mind any sense of time. Deliberately he had decided that he no longer would take account of time, for as the world then stood, time was meaningless. Only later had he understood that what he’d really sought had been forgetfulness. But he had been wrong. It had not brought forgetfulness; he still remembered, but in scrambled and haphazard sequences.