Clifford D. Simak - Over the River & Other Stories.

1. Over the River and Thru The Woods

2. Condition of Employment

3. Small Deer

4. Shotgun Cure

5. Madness From Mars

6. Good Night, Mr. James

7. A Death in the House

8. Sunspot Purge

9. The Autumn Land

10. The Sitters

11. Galactic Chest

12. Drop Dead

13. Dinal Gentleman

14. The Golden Bugs

15. Leg. Forst

16. All The Traps of Earth

17. So Bright the Vision

18. The Thing in the Stone

19. Installment Plan

Title : Over the River and through the Woods

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1965

Genre : science fiction

Comments : to my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this book

Source : scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word

2000.

Date of e-text : February 14, 2000

Prepared by : Anada Sucka

======================================================================

Over the River and through the Woods

Clifford D. Simak

The two children came trudging down the lane in applecanning time, when the first goldenrods were blooming and

the wild asters large in bud. They looked, when she first saw them, out the kitchen window, like children who were

coming home from school, for each of them was carrying a bag in which might have been their books. Like Charles and

James, she thought, like Alice and Maggie - but the time when those four had trudged the lane on their daily trips to

school was in the distant past. Now they had children of their own who made their way to school.

She turned back to the stove to stir the cooking apples, for which the wide-mouthed jars stood waiting on the table,

then once more looked out the kitchen window. The two of them were closer now and she could see that the boy was

the older of the two - ten, perhaps, and the girl no more than eight.

They might be going past, she thought, although that did not seem too likely, for the lane led to this farm and to

nowhere else.

The turned off the lane before they reached the barn and came sturdily trudging up the path that led to the house.

There was no hesitation in them; they knew where they were going.

She stepped to the screen door of the kitchen as they came onto the porch and they stopped before the door and

stood looking up at her.

The boy said: 'You are our grandma. Papa said we were to say at once that you were our grandma.'

'But that's not...,' she said, and stopped. She had been about to say that it was impossible that she was not their

grandma. And, looking down into the sober, childish faces, she was glad that she had not said the words.

'I am Ellen,' said the girl, in a piping voice.

'Why, that is strange,' the woman said. 'That is my name, too.'

The boy said, 'My name is Paul.'

She pushed open the door for them and they came in, standing silently in the kitchen, looking all about them as if

they'd never seen a kitchen.

'It's just like Papa said,' said Ellen. 'There's the stove and the churn and...'

The boy interrupted her. 'Our name is Forbes,' he said.

This time the woman couldn't stop herself. 'Why, that's impossible,' she said. 'That is our name, too.'

The boy nodded solemnly. 'Yes, we knew it was.'

'Perhaps,' the woman said, 'you'd like some milk and cookies.'

'Cookies!' Ellen squealed, delighted.

'We don't want to be any trouble,' said the boy. 'Papa said we were to be no trouble.'

'He said we should be good,' piped Ellen.

'I am sure you will be,' said the woman, 'and you are no trouble.'

In a little while, she thought, she'd get it straightened out.

She went to the stove and set the kettle with the cooking apples to one side, where they would simmer slowly.

'Sit down at the table,' she said. 'I'll get the milk and cookies.'

She glanced at the clock, ticking on the shelf. Four o'clock, almost. In just a little while the men would come in from

the fields. Jackson Forbes would know what to do about this; he had always known.

They climbed up on two chairs and sat there solemnly, staring all about them, at the ticking clock, at the wood stove

with the fire glow showing through its draft, at the wood piled in the wood box, at the butter churn standing in the

corner.

They set their bags on the floor beside them, and they were strange bags, she noticed. They were made of heavy

cloth or canvas, but there were no drawstrings or no straps to fasten them. But they were closed, she saw, despite no

straps or strings.

'Do you have some stamps?' asked Ellen.

'Stamps?' asked Mrs Forbes.

'You must pay no attention to her,' said Paul. 'She should not have asked you. She asks everyone and Mama told her

not to.'

'But stamps?'

'She collects them. She goes around snitching letters that other people have. For the stamps on them, you know.'

'Well now,' said Mrs Forbes, 'there may be some old letters. We'll look for them later on.'

She went into the pantry and got the earthen jug of milk and filled a plate with cookies from the jar. When she came

back they were sitting there sedately, waiting for the cookies.

'We are here just for a little while,' said Paul. 'Just a short vacation. Then our folks will come and get us and take us

back again.'

Ellen nodded her head vigorously. 'That's what they told us when we went. When I was afraid to go.'

'You were afraid to go?'

'Yes. It was all so strange.'

'There was so little time,' said Paul. 'Almost none at all. We had to leave so fast.'

'And where are you from?' asked Mrs Forbes. 'Why,' said the boy, 'just a little ways from here. We walked just a little

ways and of course we had the map. Papa gave it to us and he went over it carefully with us...'

'You're sure your name is Forbes?'

Ellen bobbed her head. 'Of course it is,' she said. 'Strange,' said Mrs Forbes. And it was more than strange, for there

were no other Forbes in the neighborhood except her children and her grandchildren and these two, no matter what

they said, were strangers.

They were busy with the milk and cookies and she went back to the stove and set the kettle with the apples back on

the front again, stirring the cooking fruit with a wooden spoon.

'Where is Grandpa?' Ellen asked.

'Grandpa's in the field. He'll be coming in soon. Are you finished with your cookies?'

'All finished,' said the girl.

'Then we'll have to set the table and get the supper cooking. Perhaps you'd like to help me.'

Ellen hopped down off the chair. 'I'll help,' she said. 'And I,' said Paul, 'will carry in some wood. Papa said I should be

helpful. He said I could carry in the wood and feed the chickens and hunt the eggs and...'

'Paul,' said Mrs Forbes, 'it might help if you'd tell me what your father does.'

'Papa,' said the boy, 'is a temporal engineer.'

The two hired men sat at the kitchen table with the checkerboard between them. The two older people were in the

living room.

'You never saw the likes of it,' said Mrs Forbes. 'There was this piece of metal and you pulled it and it ran along

another metal strip and the bag came open. And you pulled it the other way and the bag was closed.'

'Something new,' said Jackson Forbes. 'There may be many new things we haven't heard about, back here in the

sticks. There are inventors turning out all sorts of things.'

'And the boy,' she said, 'has the same thing on his trousers. I picked them up from where he threw them on the floor

when he went to bed and I folded them and put them on the chair. And I saw this strip of metal, the edges jagged-like.

And the clothes they wear. That boy's trousers are cut off above the knees and the dress that the girl was wearing was

so short...'

'They talked of plains,' mused Jackson Forbes, 'but not the plains we know. Something that is used, apparently, for

folks to travel in. And rockets - as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Earth.'

'We couldn't question them, of course,' said Mrs Forbes. 'There was something about them, something that I sensed.'

Her husband nodded. 'They were frightened, too.'

'You are frightened, Jackson?'

'I don't know,' he said, 'but there are no other Forbes. Not close, that is. Charlie is the closest and he's five miles

away. And they said they walked just a little piece.'

'What are you going to do?' she asked. 'What can we do?'

'I don't rightly know,' he said. 'Drive in to the county seat and talk with the sheriff, maybe. These children must be

lost. There must be someone looking for them.'

'But they don't act as if they're lost,' she told him. 'They knew they were coming here. They knew we would be here.

They told me I was their grandma and they asked after you and they called you Grandpa. And they are so sure. They

don't act as if we're strangers. They've been told about us. They said they'd stay just a little while and that's the way

they act. As if they'd just come for a visit.'

'I think,' said Jackson Forbes, 'that I'll hitch up Nellie after breakfast and drive around the neighborhood and ask

some questions. Maybe there'll be someone who can tell me something.'

'The boy said his father was a temporal engineer. That just don't make sense. 'Temporal means the worldly power and

authority and...'

'It might be some joke,' her husband said. 'Something that the father said in jest and the son picked up as truth.'

'I think,' said Mrs Forbes, 'I'll go upstairs and see if they're asleep. I left their lamps turned low. They are so little and

the house is strange to them. If they are asleep, I'll blow out the lamps.'

Jackson Forbes grunted his approval. 'Dangerous,' he said, 'to keep lights burning of the night. Too much chance of

fire.'

The boy was asleep, flat upon his back - the deep and healthy sleep of youngsters. He had thrown his clothes upon

the floor when he had undressed to go to bed, but now they were folded neatly on the chair, where she had placed

them when she had gone into the room to say goodnight.

The bag stood beside the chair and it was open, the two rows of jagged metal gleaming dully in the dim glow of the

lamp. Within its shadowed interior lay the dark forms of jumbled possessions, disorderly, and helter-skelter, no way for

a bag to be.

She stooped and picked up the bag and set it on the chair and reached for the little metal tab to close it. At least, she

told herself, it should be closed and not left standing open. She grasped the tab and it slid smoothly along the metal

tracks and then stopped, its course obstructed by an object that stuck out.

She saw it was a book and reached down to rearrange it so she could close the bag. And as she did so, she saw the

title in its faint gold lettering across the leather backstrap - Holy Bible.

With her fingers grasping the book, she hesitated for a moment, then slowly drew it out. It was bound in an

expensive black leather that was dulled with age. The edges were cracked and split and the leather worn from long

usage. The gold edging of the leaves were faded.

Hesitantly, she opened it and there, upon the fly leaf, in old and faded ink, was the inscription:

To Sister Ellen from Amelia Oct. 30, 1896

Many Happy Returns of the Day

She felt her knees grow weak and she let herself carefully to the floor and there, crouched beside the chair, read the

fly leaf once again.

30 October 1896 - that was her birthday, certainly, but it had not come as yet, for this was only the beginning of

September, 1896.

And the Bible - how old was this Bible she held within her hands? A hundred years, perhaps, more than a hundred

years.

A Bible, she thought - exactly the kind of gift Amelia would give her. But a gift that had not been given yet, one that

could not be given, for that day upon the fly leaf was a month into the future.

It couldn't be, of course. It was some kind of stupid joke. Or some mistake. Or a coincidence, perhaps. Somewhere

else someone else was named Ellen and also had a sister who was named Amelia and the date was a mistake - someone

had written the wrong year. It would be an easy thing to do.

But she was not convinced. They had said the name was Forbes and they had come straight here and Paul had

spoken of a map so they could find the way.

Perhaps there were other things inside the bag. She looked at it and shook her head. She shouldn't pry. It had been

wrong to take the Bible out.

On 30 October she would be fifty-nine - an old farm-wife with married sons and daughters and grandchildren who

came to visit her on week-end and on holidays. And a sister Amelia who, in this year of 1896, would give her a Bible as

a birthday gift.

Her hands shook as she lifted the Bible and put it back into the bag. She'd talk to Jackson when she went down

stairs. He might have some thought upon the matter and he'd know what to do.

She tucked the book back into the bag and pulled the tab and the bag was closed. She set it on the floor again and

looked at the boy upon the bed. He still was fast asleep, so she blew out the light.

In the adjoining room little Ellen slept, baby-like, upon her stomach. The low flame of the turned-down lamp flickered

gustily in the breeze that came through an open window.

Ellen's bag was closed and stood squared against the chair with a sense of neatness. The woman looked at it and

hesitated for a moment, then moved on around the bed to where the lamp stood on a bedside table.

The children were asleep and everything was well and she'd blow out the light and go downstairs and talk with

Jackson, and perhaps there'd be no need for him to hitch up Nellie in the morning and drive around to ask questions of

the neighbors.

As she leaned to blow out the lamp, she saw the envelope upon the table, with the two large stamps of many colors

affixed to the upper right-hand corner.

Such pretty stamps, she thought - I never saw so pretty. She leaned closer to take a look at them and saw the

country name upon them. Israel. But there was no such actual place as Israel. It was a Bible name, but there was no

country. And if there were no country, how could there be stamps?

She picked up the envelope and studied the stamp, making sure that she had seen right. Such a pretty stamp!

She collects them, Paul had said. She's always snitching letters that belong to other people.

The envelope bore a postmark, and presumably a date, but it was blurred and distorted by a hasty, sloppy

cancellation and she could not make it out.

The edge of a letter sheet stuck a quarter inch out of the ragged edges where the envelope had been torn open and

she pulled it out, gasping in her haste to see it while an icy fist of fear was clutching at her heart.

It was, she saw, only the end of a letter, the last page of a letter, and it was in type rather than in longhand - type like

one saw in a newspaper or a book.

Maybe one of those new-fangled things they had in big city offices, she thought, the ones she'd read about.

Typewriters - was that what they were called?

_do not believe_, the one page read ,_your plan is feasible. There is no time. The aliens are closing in and they will

not give us time.

And there is the further consideration of the ethics of it, even if it could be done. We can not, in all conscience,

scurry back into the past and visit our problems upon the people of a century ago. Think of the problems it would

create for them, the economic confusion and the psychological effect.

If you feel that you must, at least, send the children back, think a moment of the wrench it will give those two good

souls when they realize the truth. Theirs is a smug and solid world - sure and safe and sound. The concepts of this

mad century would destroy all they have, all that they believe in.

But I suppose I cannot presume to counsel you. I have done what you asked. I have written you all I know of our old

ancestors back on that Wisconsin farm. As historian of the family, I am sure my facts are right. Use them as you see fit

and God have mercy on us all.

Your loving brother,

Jackson

P.S. A suggestion. If you do send the children back, you might send along with them a generous supply of the new

cancer-inhibitor drug. Great-great-grandmother Forbes died in 1904 of a condition that I suspect was cancer. Given

those pills, she might survive another ten or twenty years. And what, I ask you, brother, would that mean to this

tangled future? I don't pretend to know. It might save us. It might kill us quicker. It might have no effect at all. I leave

the puzzle to you.

If I can finish up work here and get away, I'll be with you at the end._

Mechanically she slid the letter back into the envelope and laid it upon the table beside the flaring lamp.

Slowly she moved to the window that looked out on the empty lane.

They will come and get us, Paul had said. But would they ever come. Could they ever come?

She found herself wishing they would come. Those poor people, those poor frightened children caught so far in time.

Blood of my blood, she thought, flesh of my flesh, so many years away. But still her flesh and blood, no matter how

removed. Not only these two beneath this roof tonight, but all those others who had not come to her.

The letter had said 1904 and cancer and that was eight years away - she'd be an old, old woman then. And the

signature had been Jackson - an old family name, she wondered, carried on and on, a long chain of people who bore

the name of Jackson Forbes?

She was stiff and numb, she knew. Later she'd be frightened. Later she would wish she had not read the letter.

Perhaps, she did not know.

But now she must go back downstairs and tell Jackson the best way that she could.

She moved across the room and blew out the light and went out into the hallway.

A voice came from the open door beyond.

'Grandma, is that you?'

'Yes, Paul,' she answered. 'What can I do for you?'

In the doorway she saw him crouched beside the chair, in the shaft of moonlight pouring through the window,

fumbling at the bag.

'I forgot,' he said. 'There was something papa said I was to give you right away.'

Condition of Employment

by

Clifford D. Simak

HE HAD BEEN dreaming of home, and when he came awake, he held his eyes tight shut in a desperate effort not to

lose the dream. He kept some of it, but it was blurred and faint and lacked the sharp distinction and the color of the

dream.

He could tell it to himself, he knew just how it was, he could recall it as a lost and far-off thing and place, but it was

not there as it had been in the dream.

But even so, he held his eyes tight shut, for now that he was awake, he knew what they'd open on, and he shrank

from the drabness and the coldness of the room in which he lay. It was, he thought, not alone the drabness and the

cold, but also the loneliness and the sense of not belonging. So long as he did not look at it, he need not accept this

harsh reality, although he felt himself on the fringe of it, and it was reaching for him, reaching through the color and

the warmth and friendliness of this other place he tried to keep in mind.

At last it was impossible. The fabric of the held-onto dream became too thin and fragile to ward off the moment of

reality, and he let his eyes come open.

It was every bit as bad as he remembered it. It was drab and cold and harsh, and there was the maddening alienness

waiting for him, crouching in the corner. He tensed himself against it, trying to work up his courage, hardening himself

to arise and face it for another day.

The plaster of the ceiling was cracked and had flaked away in great ugly blotches. The paint on the wall was peeling

and dark stains ran down it from the times the rain leaked in. And there was the smell, the musty human smell that had

been caged in the room too long.

Staring at the ceiling, he tried to see the sky. There had been a time when he could have seen it through this or any

ceiling. For the sky had belonged to him, the sky and the wild, dark space beyond it. But now he'd lost them. They

were his no longer.

A few marks in a book, be thought, an entry in the record. That was all that was needed to smash a man's career, to

crush his hope forever and to keep him trapped and exiled on a planet that was not his own.

He sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bed, hunting for the trousers he'd left on the floor. He found and

pulled them on and scuffed into his shoes and stood up in the room.

The room was small and mean - and cheap. There would come a day when he could not afford a room even as cheap

as this. His cash was running out, and when the last of it was gone, he would have to get some job, any kind of job.

Perhaps he should have gotten one before he began to run so short. But he had shied away from it. For settling down

to work would be an admission that he was defeated, that he had given up his hope of going home again.

He had been a fool, he told himself, for ever going into space. Let him just get back to Mars and no one could ever

get him off it. He'd go back to the ranch and stay there as his father had wanted him to do. He'd marry Eller and settle

down, and other fools could fly the death-traps around the Solar System.

Glamor, he thought-it was the glamor that sucked in the kids when they were young and starry-eyed. The glamor of

the far place, of the wilderness of space, of the white eyes of the stars watching in that wilderness - the glamor of the

engine-song and of the chill white metal knifing through the blackness and the loneliness of the emptiness, and the

few cubic feet of courage and defiance that thumbed its nose at that emptiness.

But there was no glamor. There was brutal work and everlasting watchfulness and awful sickness, the terrible fear

that listened for the stutter in the drive, for the ping against the metal hide, for any one of the thousand things that

could happen out in space.

He picked up his wallet off the bedside table and put it in his pocket and went out into the hall and down the rickety

stairs to the crumbling, lopsided porch outside.

And the greenness waited for him, the unrelenting, bilious green of Earth. It was a thing to gag at, to steel oneself

against, an indecent and abhorrent color for anyone to look at. The grass was green and all the plants and every single

tree. There was no place outdoors and few indoors where one could escape from it, and when one looked at it too

long, it seemed to pulse and tremble with a hidden life.

The greenness, and the brightness of the sun, and the sapping beat - these were things of Earth that it was hard to

bear. The light one could get away from, and the heat one could somehow ride along with - but the green was always

there.

He went down the steps, fumbling in his pocket for a cigarette. He found a crumpled package and in it one crumpled

cigarette. He put it between his lips and threw the pack away and stood at the gate, trying to make up his mind.

But it was a gesture only, this hardening of his mind, for he knew what he would do. There was nothing else to do.

He'd done it day after day for more weeks than he cared to count, and he'd do it again today and tomorrow and

tomorrow, until his cash ran out.

And after that, he wondered, what?

Get a job and try to strike a bargain with his situation? Try to save against the day when he could buy passage back

to Mars - for they'd surely let him ride the ships even if they wouldn't let him run them. But, he told himself, he'd

figured that one out. It would take twenty years to save enough, and he had no twenty years.

He lit the cigarette and went tramping down the street, and even through the cigarette, he could smell the hated

green.

Ten blocks later, he reached the far edge of the spaceport. There was a ship. He stood for a moment looking at it

before he went into the shabby restaurant to buy himself some breakfast.

There was a ship, he thought, and that was a hopeful sign. Some days there weren't any, some days three or four.

But there was a ship today and it might be the one.

One day, he told himself, he'd surely find the ship out there that would take him home - a ship with a captain so

desperate for an engineer that he would overlook the entry in the book.

But even as he thought it, be knew it for a lie - a lie he told himself each day. Perhaps to justify his coming here each

day to check at the hiring hall, to lie to keep his hope alive, to keep his courage up. A lie that made it even barely

possible to face the bleak, warm room and the green of Earth.

He went into the restaurant and sat down on a stool.

The waitress came to take his order. "Cakes again?" she asked.

He nodded. Pancakes were cheap and filling and he had to make his money last.

"You'll find a ship today," said the waitress. "I have a feeling you will."

"Perhaps I will," he said, without believing it.

"I know just how you feel," the waitress told him. "I know how awful it can be. I was homesick once myself, the first

time I left home. I thought I would die."

He didn't answer, for he felt it would not have been dignified to answer. Although why he should now lay claim to

dignity, he could not imagine.

But this, in any case, was more than simple homesickness. It was planetsickness, culturesickness, a cutting off of all

he'd known and wanted.

Sitting, waiting for the cakes to cook, he caught the dream again - the dream of red hills rolling far into the land, of the

cold, dry air soft against the skin, of the splendor of the stars at twilight and the faery yellow of the distant sandstorm.

And the low house crouched against the land, with the old gray-haired man sitting stiffly in a chair upon the porch

that faced toward the sunset.

The waitress brought the cakes.

The day would come, he told himself, when he could afford no longer this self-pity he carried. He knew it for what it

was and he should get rid of it. And yet it was a thing he lived with - even more than that, it had become a way of life.

It was his comfort and his shield, the driving force that kept him trudging on each day.

He finished the cakes and paid for them.

"Good luck," said the waitress, with a smile.

"Thank you," he said.

He tramped down the road, with the gravel crunching underfoot and the sun like a blast upon his back, but he had

left the greenness. The port lay bare and bald, scalped and cauterized.

He reached where he was going and went up to the desk.

"You again," said the union agent.

"Anything for Mars?"

"Not a thing. No, wait a minute. There was a man in here not too long ago."

The agent got up from the desk and went to the door. Then he stepped outside the door and began to shout at

someone.

A few minutes later, he was back. Behind him came a lumbering and irate individual. He had a cap upon his head that

said CAPTAIN in greasy, torn letters, but aside from that he was distinctly out of uniform.

"Here's the man," the agent told the captain. "Name of Anson Cooper. Engineer first class, but his record's not too

good."

"Damn the record!" bawled the captain. He said to Cooper: "Do you know Morrisons?"

"I was raised with them," said Cooper. It was not the truth, but he knew he could get by.

"They're good engines," said the captain, "but cranky and demanding. You'll have to baby them. You'll have to sleep

with them. And if you don't watch them close, they'll up and break your back."

"I know how to handle them," said Cooper.

"My engineer ran out on me." The captain spat on the floor to show his contempt for runaway engineers. "He wasn't

man enough."

"I'm man enough," Cooper declared.

And he knew, standing there, what it would be like. But there was no other choice. If he wanted to get back to Mars,

he had to take the Morrisons.

"O.K., then, come on with you," the captain said.

"Wait a minute," said the union agent. "You can't rush off a man like this. You have to give him time to pick up his

duffle."

"I haven't any to pick up," Cooper said, thinking of the few pitiful belongings back in the boarding house. "Or none

that matters."

"You understand," the agent said to the captain, "that the union cannot vouch for a man with a record such as his."

"To hell with that," said the captain. "Just so he can run the engines. That's all I ask."

The ship stood far out in the field. She had not been much to start with and she had not improved with age. Just the

job of riding on a craft like that would be high torture, without the worry of nursing Morrisons.

"She'll hang together, no fear," said the captain. "She's got a lot more trips left in her than you'd think. It beats all hell

what a tub like that can take."

Just one more trip, thought Cooper. Just so she gets me to Mars. Then she can fall apart, for all I care.

"She's beautiful," he said, and meant it.

He walked up to one of the great landing fins and laid a hand upon it. It was solid metal, with all the paint peeled off

it, with tiny pits of corrosion speckling its surface and with a hint of cold, as if it might not as yet have shed all the

touch of space.

And this was it, he thought. After all the weeks of waiting, here finally was the thing of steel and engineering that

would take him home again.

He walked back to where the captain stood.

"Let's get on with it," he said. "I'll want to look the engines over."

"They're all right," said the captain.

"That may be so. I still want to run a check on them." He had expected the engines to be bad, but not as bad as they

turned out to be. If the ship had not been much to look at, the Morrisons were worse.

"They'll need some work," he said. "We can't lift with them, the shape they're in."'

The captain raved and swore. "We have to blast by dawn, damn it! This is a goddam emergency."

"You'll lift by dawn," snapped Cooper. "Just leave me alone."

He drove his gang to work, and he worked himself, for fourteen solid hours, without a wink of sleep, without a bite to

eat.

Then he crossed his fingers and told the captain he was ready.

They got out of atmosphere with the engines holding together. Cooper uncrossed the fingers and sighed with deep

relief. Now all he had to do was keep them running.

The captain called him forward and brought out a bottle. "You did better, Mr. Cooper, than I thought you would."

Cooper shook his head. "We aren't there yet, Captain. We've a long way still to go."

"Mr. Cooper," said the captain, "you know what we are carrying? You got any idea at all?"

Cooper shook his head.

"Medicines," the captain told him. "There's an epidemic out there. We were the only ship anywhere near ready for

takeoff. So we were requisitioned."

"It would have been much better if we could have overhauled the engines."

"We didn't have the time. Every minute counts."

Clifford D. Simak - Over the River & Other Stories.

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