Simak, Cliffard D - Sitters, The - Notisblokk

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Simak, Cliffard D - Sitters, The

Title: The Sitters

Author: Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: unknown, re-published 1962

Genre: science fiction

Comments: To my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this story.

Source: scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro

9.0, proofread in MS Word 2000.

Date of e-text: August 15, 1999

Prepared by: Anada Sucka

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

THE SITTERS

Clifford D. Simak

THE FIRST WEEK of school was finished. Johnson Dean, superintendent of

Millville High, sat at his desk, enjoying the quiet and the satisfaction of late

Friday afternoon.

The quiet was massacred by Coach Jerry Higgins. He clomped into the office

and threw his muscular blond frame heavily in a chair.

"Well, you can call off football for the year," he said angrily. "We can

drop out of the conference."

Dean pushed away the papers on which he had been working and leaned back in

his chair. The sunlight from the western windows turned his silver thatch into a

seeming halo.

His pale, blue-veined, wrinkled hands smoothed out, painstakingly, the

fading crease in his fading trousers.

"What has happened now?" he asked.

"It's King and Martin, Mr. Dean. They aren't coming out this year."

Dean clucked sympathetically, but somewhat hollowly, as if his heart was not

quite in it. "Let me see," he said. "If I remember rightly, those two were very

good last year. King was in the line and Martin quarterback."

Higgins exploded in righteous indignation. "Who ever heard of a quarterback

deciding he wouldn't play no more?

And not just an ordinary boy, but one of the very best. He made

all-conference last year."

"You've talked to them, of course?"

"I got down on my knees to them," said the coach. "I asked them did they

want that I should lose my job. I asked is there anything you got against me. I

told them they were letting down the school. I told them we wouldn't have a team

without them. They didn't laugh at me, but -"

"They wouldn't laugh at you," said Dean. "Those boys are gentlemen. In fact,

all the youngsters in school -"

"They're a pack of sissies!" stormed the coach.

Dean said gently, "That is a matter of opinion. There have been moments when

I also wasn't able to attach as much importance to football as it seemed to me I

should."

"But that's different," argued the coach. "When a man grows up, naturally he

will lose some interest. But these are kids. This just isn't healthy. These

Side 1

Simak, Cliffard D - Sitters, The

young fellows should be out there pawing up the earth. All kids should have a

strong sense of competition. And even if they don't, there's the financial

angle. Any outstanding football man has a chance, when he goes to college -"

"Our kids don't need athletic subsidies," said Dean, a little sharply.

"They're getting more than their share of scholastic scholarships."

"If we had a lot more material," moaned Higgins, "King and Martin wouldn't

mean so much. We wouldn't win too often, but we still would have a team. But as

it is - do you realize, Mr. Dean, that there have been fewer coming out each

year? Right now, I haven't more than enough -"

"You've talked to King and Martin. You're sure they won't reconsider?"

"You know what they told me? They said football interfered with studies!"

The way Higgins said it, it was rank heresy.

"I guess, then," Dean said cheerfully, "that we'll just have to face it."

"But it isn't normal," the coach protested. "There aren't any kids who think

more of studies than they do of football. There aren't any kids so wrapped up in

books -"

"There are," said Dean. "There are a lot, right here at Millville. You

should take a look at the grade averages over the past ten years, if you don't

believe it."

"What gets me is that they don't act like kids. They act like a bunch of

adults." The coach shook his head, as if to say it was all beyond him. "It's a

dirty shame. If only some of those big bruisers would turn out, we'd have the

makings of a team."

"Here, also," Dean reminded him, "we have the makings of men and women that

Millville in the future may very well be proud of."

The coach got up angrily. "We won't win a game," he warned. "Even Bagley

will beat us."

"That is something," Dean observed philosophically, "that shan't worry me

too much."

He sat quietly at his desk and listened to the hollow ringing of the coach's

footsteps going down the corridor, dimming out with distance.

And he heard the swish and rumble of a janitorial servomechanism wiping down

the stairs. He wondered where Stuffy was. Fiddling around somewhere, no doubt.

With all the scrubbers and the washers and wipers and other mechanical

contraptions, there wasn't too much to take up Stuffy's time.

Although Stuffy, in his day, had done a lot of work - he'd been on the go

from dark to dark, a top-notch janitor.

If it weren't for the labor shortage, Stuffy would have been retired several

years ago. But they didn't retire men any more the way they had at one time.

With Man going to the stars, there now was more than the human race could do. If

they had been retiring men, Dean thought, he himself would be without a job.

And there was nothing he would have hated more than that. For Millville High

was his. He had made it his. For more than fifty years, he'd lived for Millville

High, first as a young and eager teacher, then as principal, and now, the last

fifteen years or so, as its superintendent.

He had given everything he had. And it had given back. It had been wife and

child and family, a beginning and an end. And he was satisfied, he told himself

- satisfied on this Friday of a new school year, with Stuffy puttering somewhere

in the building and no football team - or, at least, next to none.

Side 2

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