Clifford D. Simak - They Walked Like Men

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THEY WALKED LIKE MEN

CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

A MANOR BOOK.....1975

Manor Books Inc.

432 Park Avenue South

New York, New York 10016

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-17362

Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A.

Scanned using FineReader 6.0 Professional

DimJim

It was Thursday night and I'd had too much to drink and the hall was dark and

that was the only thing that saved me. If I hadn't stopped beneath the hall

light just outside my door to sort out the keys, I would have stepped into the

trap, just as sure as hell.

Its being Thursday night had nothing to do with it, actually, but that's the

way I write. I'm a newspaperman, and newspapermen put the day of the week and

the time of day and all the other pertinent information into everything they

write.

The hall was dark because Old George Weber was a penny-pinching soul. He spent

half his time fighting with the other tenants about cutting down the heat or

not installing air conditioning or the plumbing's being on the fritz again or

why he never got around to redecorating. He never fought with me because I

didn't care. It was a place to sleep and eat occasionally and to spend what

spare time I had, and I wasn't fussy. We thought an awful lot of one another,

did Old George and I. We played pinochle together and we drank beer together

and every fall we went out to South Dakota for the pheasant hunting. But we

wouldn't be going this year, I remembered, because that very morning I had

driven Old George and Mrs. George out to the airport and had seen them off on

a trip to California. And even if Old George had stayed at home, we wouldn't

have been going, for next week I'd be off on the trip the Old Man had been

after me to make for the last six months.

I was fumbling for the keys and I was none too steady-handed, for Gavin

Walker, the city editor, and I had got into an argument about should science

writers be required to cover stuff like council meetings and P.T.A.'s and

such. Gavin said that they should and I said that they shouldn't, and first

he'd buy some drinks and then I would buy some drinks, until it came closing

time and Ed, the bartender, had to throw us out. I'd wondered, when I left the

place, if I should risk driving home or maybe call a cab. I had decided

finally that probably I could drive, but I took the back streets, where it was

unlikely there'd be any cops. I'd got home all right and had got the car

maneuvered into the lot back of the apartment building, but I hadn't tried to

park it. I'd just left it sitting out in the center of the lot. I was having a

hard time getting the right key. They all seemed to look alike, and while I

was fumbling them around they slipped out of my fingers and fell onto the

carpeting.

I bent down to pick them up and I missed them on the first swipe and I missed

them on the second, so I got down on my knees to make a new approach to them.

And it was then I saw it.

Consider this: If Old George had not been a tight man with the buck, he'd put

in bigger lights out there in the hall, so that one could walk right up to his

door and pick out his key instead of going over to the center of the hall and

fumbling around underneath that misplaced lightning bug that functioned as a

light bulb. And if I hadn't gotten into the argument with Gavin and taken on a

load, I'd never have dropped the keys to start with. And even if I had, I

probably could have picked them up without getting on my knees. And if I

hadn't gotten on my knees, I never would have seen that the carpeting was cut.

Not torn, you understand. Not worn out. But cut. And cut in a funny way—cut in

a semicircle in front of my door. As if someone had used the center of my door

as a focal point and, with a knife tied to a three-foot string, had cut a

semicircle from the rug. Had cut it and left it there—for the rug had not been

taken. Someone had cut a semicircular chunk out of it and then had left it

there.

And that, I told myself, was a damn funny thing to do—a senseless sort of

thing. For why should anyone want a piece of carpeting cut in that particular

shape? And if, for some unfathomable reason, someone had wanted it, why had he

cut it out, then left it lying there?

I put out a cautious finger to be sure that I was right— that I wasn't seeing

things. And I was right, except it wasn't carpet. The stuff that lay inside

that three-foot semicircle looked for all the world like the other carpeting,

but it wasn't carpeting. It was some sort of paper—the thinnest sort of

paper—that looked exactly like the carpeting.

I pulled back my hand and stayed there on my knees, and I wasn't thinking so

much of the cutout carpeting and the paper that was there as I was thinking

how I'd explain being on my knees if someone in one of those other apartments

should come out in the hall.

But no one came out. The hall stayed empty and it had that musty smell one

associates with apartment halls. Above me I heard the tiny singing of the tiny

light bulb and I knew by the singing that it was on the verge of burning out.

And the new caretaker maybe would replace it with a bigger light bulb.

Although, I told myself on second thought, that was most unlikely, for Old

George probably had briefed him in minute detail on economic maintenance.

I put out my hand once more and touched the paper with a fingertip, and it was

paper—just as I had thought it was— or, at least, it felt very much like

paper.

And the idea of that cutout carpeting and the paper in its place made me sore

as hell. It was a dirty trick and it was a dirty fraud and I grabbed the paper

and jerked it out of there. Underneath the paper was the trap.

I staggered to my feet, with the paper still hanging from my fingers, and

stared at the trap.

I didn't believe it. No man in his right mind would have. People just simply

don't go around setting traps for other people—as if those other people might

be a bear or fox.

But the trap stayed there, lying on the floor exposed by the cutout carpeting

and until this moment covered by the paper, just as a human trapper would

cover his trap with a light sprinkling of leaves or grass to conceal it from

his quarry.

It was a big steel trap. I had never seen a bear trap, but I imagine it was as

big or bigger than a bear trap. It was a human trap, I told myself, for it had

been set for humans. For one human in particular. For there was no doubt it

had been set for me.

I backed away from it until I bumped into the wall. I stayed there against the

wall, looking at the trap, and on the carpeting between myself and the trap

lay the bunch of keys I'd dropped.

It was a gag, I told myself. But I was wrong, of course. It wasn't any gag. If

I'd stepped over to the door instead of stopping underneath the light, it

would have been no gag. I'd have a mangled leg—or perhaps both legs mangled

and perhaps some broken bones—for the jaws were equipped with jagged, offset

teeth. And no one in God's world could have forced the jaws apart once they'd

snapped upon their victim. To free a man from a trap like that would call for

wrenches to take the trap apart.

I shivered, thinking of it. A man could bleed to death before anyone could get

that trap apart.

I stood there, looking at the trap, with my hand crumpling up the paper as I

looked. And then I raised an arm and hurled the wad of paper at the trap. It

hit one jaw and rolled

off and barely missed the pan and lay there between the jaws.

I'd have to get a stick or something, I told myself, and spring the trap

before I could get into my place. I could call the cops, of course, but

there'd be no sense in that. They'd create a terrible uproar and more than

likely take me down to headquarters to ask me a lot of questions, and I didn't

have the time. I was all. tuckered out and all I wanted was to crawl into my

bed.

More than that, a ruckus of that sort would give the apartment a bad name, and

that would be a dirty trick to play on Old George when he was out in

California. And it would give all my neighbors something to talk about and

they'd want to talk to me about it and I didn't want that. They left me alone

and that was the way I wanted it. I was happy just the way it was.

I wondered where I could find a stick, and the only place I could think of was

the closet down on the first floor where the brooms and mops and the vacuum

cleaner and the other junk were kept. I tried to remember if the closet might

be locked, and I didn't think it was, but I couldn't be positively sure.

I stepped out from the wall and started for the stairs. I had just reached the

top of them when something made me turn around. I don't think I heard

anything. I'm fairly sure I didn't. But the effect was the same as if I had.

There was something said for me to turn around, and I turned around so fast my

feet got tangled up and threw me to the floor.

And even as I fell I saw the trap was wilting.

I tried to ease my fall by putting out my hands, but I didn't do so well. I

hit with quite a thud and banged my head, and my brain was full of stars.

I got my hands under me and hoisted up my front and shook the stars away and

the trap had gone on wilting.

The jaws were limp and the whole contraption was humped up in a most peculiar

way. I watched it in some wonder, not doing anything, just lying there, with

the front of me propped up on my arms.

The trap got limper and limper and began to hump together. It was as if a

piece of mashed-out, mangled plastic putty was trying to put itself into shape

again. And it did put itself into shape. It made itself into a ball. All this

time that it has been humping itself together, it had been changing color, and

when it finally was a ball it was as black as pitch.

It lay there for a moment in front of the door and then it began rolling

slowly, as if it took a lot of effort to get itself to rolling.

And it rolled straight for me!

I tried to get out of its way, but it built its speed up fast and I thought

for an instant it would crash straight into me. It was about the size of a

bowling ball, maybe just a little bigger, and I had no way of knowing how

heavy it might be.

But it didn't hit me. It brushed me, that was all.

I twisted to watch it go down the stairs, and that was a funny thing. It

bounced down the steps, but not the way a normal ball would bounce. It bounced

short and fast, not high and lazy—as if there were a law which said it must

hit every tread but make the best speed that it could. It went down the

flight, hitting every tread, and it went around the corner post so fast you

could almost see the smoke.

I scrambled to my feet and got to the banister and leaned over to see the

flight below. But the ball was out of sight. There was no sign of it.

I went back down the hall and there, underneath the light, lay the bunch of

keys, and there was the three-foot semicircle cut out of the carpet.

I got down on my knees and picked up the keys and found the right one finally

and got over to the door. I unlocked it and went into the apartment and locked

the door, real fast, behind me before I even took the time to turn on a light

I got the light turned on and made it to the kitchen. I sat down at the

breakfast table and remembered there was a pitcher almost half full of tomato

juice in the refrigerator and that I should drink some of it. But I couldn't

stand the thought of it. I gagged just thinking of it. What I really needed

was another slug of booze, but I'd had too much of that already.

I sat there, thinking about the trap and why anyone would set a trap for me.

It was the craziest thing I had ever heard of. If I hadn't seen that trap

myself, I'd never have believed it.

It was no trap, of course—no regular trap, that is. For regular traps do not

wilt and roll into a ball and go rolling away when they've failed to catch

their quarry.

I tried to reason it all out, but my brain was fuzzy and I was sleepy and I

was safe at home and tomorrow was another day. So I gave up everything and

staggered off to bed.

Something jerked me out of sleep.

I came up straight, not knowing where I was, not knowing who I was—entirely

disoriented, not fuzzy, not sleepy, not confused, but with that terrible, cold

clarity of mind that makes an emptiness of everything in its sudden flash of

being. I was in a silence, in an emptiness, in a lightless nowhere, and that

clear, cold mind speared out like a striking snake, seeking, finding nothing,

and horrified at the nothingness.

Then the clamor came—the high, shrill, insistent, insane clamor, which was

entirely mindless in that it was not meant for me or for anything but clamored

solely for itself.

The silence fell again and there were shadows that were shapes—a square of

half-light that turned out to be a window, a faint gleam from the kitchen

where the light still burned, a crouched, dark monstrosity that was an easy

chair.

The phone screamed again through the morning darkness and I tumbled out of

bed, heading blindly for a door that I could not see. Groping, I found it, and

the phcne was silent now.

I went across the living room, stumbling in the darkness, and was putting out

my hand when it bagan to ring again.

I jerked it from the cradle viciously and mumbled into it. There was something

the matter with my tongue. It didn't want to work.

"Parker?"

"Who else?"

"This is Joe—Joe Newman."

"Joe?" Then I remembered. Joe Newman was the dogwatch man on the night desk at

the paper.

"Hate to get you up," said Joe.

I mumbled at him wrathfully.

"Something funny happened. Thought you ought to know."

"Look, Joe," I said. "Call Gavin. He's the city editor. He gets paid for being

gotten out of bed."

"But this is down your alley, Parker. This is—"

"Yeah, I know," I told him. "A flying saucer landed."

"Not that. You ever hear of Timber Lane?"

"Out by the lake," I said. "Way out west of town."

"That's it. The old Belmont place is at the end of it. House closed up.

Ever since the Belmont family moved out to Arizona. Kids use the road as a

lovers' lane."

"Now, look, Joe..."

"I was getting to it, Parker. Some kids were parked out there tonight. They

saw a bunch of balls rolling down the road. Like bowling balls, one behind the

other."

I'm afraid I yelled at him: "They what?"

"They saw these things in the headlights when they were driving out and got

panicky. Put a call in to the cops."

I got myself in hand and made my voice calm. "Cops find anything?"

"Just tracks," said Joe.

"Bowling ball tracks?"

"Yeah, I guess you could call them that."

I told him: "Kids been drinking, maybe."

"Cops didn't say so. They talked with these kids. They just saw the balls

rolling down the road. They didn't stop to investigate. They just got out of

there."

I didn't say anything. I was trying to figure out what I ought to say. And I

was scared. Scared stiff.

"What do you think of it, Parker?"

"I don't know," I said. "Imagination maybe. Or ribbing the cops."

"The cops found tracks,"

"Kids could have made them. Could have rolled some bowling balls up and down

the road, picking out the dusty places. Figured they'd get their names into

the papers. They get bored and crazy ..."

"You wouldn't use it, then?"

"Look, Joe—I'm not the city editor. It's not up to me. Ask Gavin. He's the man

who decides what we publish."

"And you don't think there's anything to it? Maybe it's a hoax?"

"How the hell would I know?" I yelled at him.

He got sore at me. I don't blame him much.

'Thanks, Parker. Sorry that I troubled you," he said, and then hung up, and

the phone began its steady drone.

"Good night, Joe," I said into the drone. "I'm sorry that I yelled."

It helped, saying it, even if he wasn't there to hear.

And I wondered why I'd tried to downgrade the story, why I'd tried to suggest

it was no more than some teen-age prank.

Because, you slob, you're scared, said that inner man who sometimes talks to

you. Because you'd give almost anything to make yourself believe there is

nothing to it. Because you don't want to be reminded of that trap out in the

hall.

I put the receiver back into the cradle, and my hand was shaking, so that it

made a clatter when I put it down.

I stood in the darkness and felt the terror closing in. And when I tried to

put a finger on the terror, there was nothing there. For it wasn't terrible;

it was comic—a trap set outside a door, a pack of bowling balls trundling

sedately down a country lane. It was the stuff cartoons are made of. It was

something that was too ridiculous to believe. It was something that would send

you off into helpless guffaws even as it killed you.

If it meant to kill.

And that was the question, certainly. Was it meant to kill?

Had that trap outside the door actually been a trap, made of honest steel or

its equivalent? Or had it been a toy, made of harmless plastic or its

equivalent?

And the hardest question of them all—had it actually been there? I knew it

had, of course. For I had seen it there. But my mind kept trying to reject it.

For my comfort and my sanity, my mind pushed it away and the logic in me

screamed against the very thought of it.

I had been drunk, of course, but not as drunk as that. Not falling-down drunk,

not seeing-things drunk—just a little shaky in the hands and weakish in the

knees.

Now I was all right—except for that terrible, lonely coldness of the mind.

Type three hangover—and, in many ways, the worst of all of them.

By now my eyes had become somewhat dark-adapted and I could make out the

formless shape of furniture. I made my way to the kitchen without stumbling

over anything. The door was open a crack and a shaft of light streamed

through.

I had left the ceiling light on when I'd gone pottering off to bed, and the

clock on the wall said it was three-thirty.

I discovered that I was still better than half dressed and rather badly

rumpled. My shoes were off and my tie was untied but still trailing from the

collar, and I was a mess.

I stood there, taking counsel with myself. If I went back to bed at this hour

of the morning, I'd sleep like a sodden lump until noon or better and wake up

feeling terrible.

But if I got cleaned up now and got some food inside of me and went to the

office early, before anyone else arrived, I'd get a lot of work done and could

knock off early in the day and have a decent weekend.

And it was a Friday and I had a date with Joy. I stood there for a while

without doing anything, feeling good about Friday night and Joy.

I planned it all—there'd just be time to boil the coffee

water while I took a shower, and I'd have toast and eggs and bacon and I'd

drink a lot of tomato juice, which might do something for the lonely coldness

of the mind.

But first of all, before I did anything at all, I'd look out in the hall and

see if the semicircle still was gone from the carpeting.

I went to the door and looked.

In front of it lay the preposterous semicircle of bare flooring.

I jeered thinly at my doubting mind and my outraged logic and went back into

the kitchen to put on the coffee water.

III

A newsroom is a cold and lonely place early in the morning. It is big and

empty, and it's neat, so neat that it is depressing. Later in the day it takes

on the clutter that makes it warm and human—the clipped, dismembered papers

littered on the desks, the balls of scrunched-up copy paper tossed onto the

floor, the overflowing spikes. But in the morning, after the maintenance crew

has it tidied up, it has something of the pallor of an operating room. The few

lights that are burning seem far too bright and the stripped-down desks and

chairs so precisely placed that they spell a hard efficiency—the efficiency

that later in the day is masked and softened when the staff is hard at work

and the place is littered and that strange undertone of bedlam which goes into

each edition of the paper is building to a peak.

The morning staff had gone home hours before and Joe Newman also was gone. I

had rather expected that I might find him there, but his desk was as straight

and neat as all the rest of them and there was no sign of him.

The pastepots, all freshly scraped and cleaned and filled with fresh, new

paste, stood in solemn, shiny rows upon the city and the copydesks. Each pot

was adorned with a brush thrust into the paste at a jaunty angle. The copy off

the wire machines was laid out precisely on the news desk. And from the cubby

hole over in the corner came the muted chuckle of the wire machines

themselves, busily grinding out the grist of news from all parts of the world.

Somewhere in the tangled depths of the half-dark newsroom a copyboy was

whistling—one of those high-pitched, jerky tunes that are no tunes at all. I

shuddered at the sound of it. There was something that was almost obscene

about someone whistling at this hour of the morning.

I went over to my desk and sat down. Someone on the maintenance crew had taken

all my magazines and scientific journals and stacked them in a pile. Only the

afternoon before, I'd gone through them carefully and set aside the ones I

would be using in getting out my columns. I looked sourly at the stack and

swore. Now I'd have to paw through all of them to find the ones I wanted.

A copy of the last edition of the morning paper lay white and naked on the

clean desk top. I picked it up and leaned back in the chair and began running

through the news.

There wasn't much of anything. There still was trouble down in Africa, and the

Venezuela mess was looking fairly nasty. Someone had held up a downtown

drugstore just before closing time, and there was a picture of a buck-toothed

clerk pointing out to a bored policeman where the holdup man had stood. The

governor had said that the legislature, when it came back next year, would

have to buckle down to its responsibility of finding some new sources of tax

revenue. If this wasn't done, said the governor, the state would be going down

the drain. It was something that the governor had said many times before.

Over in the top, left-hand corner of page one was an area economic roundup

by-lined by Grant Jensen, business editor of the morning staff. Grant was in

one of his professionally optimistic moods. The upward business trend, he

wrote, was running strong and steady. Store sales were holding well,

industrial indexes all were on the up side, there was no immediate prospect of

any labor trouble—things were looking rosy. This was especially true, the

article went on to say, in the home construction field. The demand for housing

had outrun supply, and all the home builders in the entire federal reserve

district were booked to full capacity for almost a year ahead.

I am afraid I yawned. It all was true, undoubtedly, but it still was the same

old crud that jerks like Jensen were forever handing out. But the publisher

would like it, for it made the advertisers feel just fine and it promoted boom

psychology, and the old war-horses of the financial district would talk about

the piece that had been in the morning paper when they went to lunch this noon

at the Union Club.

Let it run the other way, I told myself—let the store sales drop off, let the

housing boom go bust, let factories start to turn away their workers—and until

the situation became inescapable, there'd be not a word about it.

I folded the paper and put it to one side. Opening up a drawer, I got out a

batch of notes I'd made the afternoon before and started going through them.

Lightning, the early-morning copyboy, came out of the shadows and stood beside

my desk.

"Good morning, Mr. Graves," he said.

"Was that you whistling?" I asked.

"Yeah, I guess it was."

He laid a proof on my desk.

"Your column for today," he said. "The one about how come the mammoth and all

those other big animals happened to die out. I thought you'd like to see it."

I picked it up and looked at it. As usual, some joker on the copydesk had

written a smart-aleck headline for it.

"You're in early, Mr. Graves," said Lightning.

I explained: "I have to get my columns out for a couple of weeks ahead. I'll

be going on a trip."

"I heard about it," said Lightning eagerly. "Astronomy."

"Well, yes, I guess you could say that. All the big observatories. Have to

write a series about outer space. Way out. Galaxies and stuff."

"Mr. Graves," said Lightning, "do you think maybe they'll let you look through

some of the telescopes?"

"I-doubt it. Telescope time is pretty tightly scheduled."

"Mr. Graves ..."

"What is it, Lightning?"

"You think there are people out there? Out on them other stars?"

"I wouldn't know. No one knows. It stands to reason there must be other life

somewhere."

"Like us?"

"No, I don't think like us."

Lightning stood there, shuffling his feet; then he said suddenly: "Gosh, I

forgot to tell you, Mr. Graves. There's someone here to see you."

"Someone here?"

"Yeah. He came in a couple of hours ago. I told him you wouldn't be in for a

long time yet. But he said he'd wait."

"Where is he, then?"

"He went into the monitoring room and took the easy chair in there. I guess he

fell asleep."

I heaved myself out of the chair. "Let's.go and see," I said.

I might have known. There was no one else who would do a thing like that.

There was no one else to whom the time of day meant nothing.

He lay back in the chair, with a silly smile pasted on his face. From the

radio panel issued the low-voiced gabble of the various police departments,

the highway patrol, the fire departments, and the other agencies of law and

order, forming a background of gibberish for his polite snoring.

We stood and looked at him.

Lightning asked: "Who is he, Mr. Graves? Do you know him, Mr. Graves?"

"His name," I said, "is Carleton Stirling. He's a biologist over at the

university and a friend of mine."

"He don't look like no biologist to me," said Lightning firmly.

"Lightning," I told the skeptic, "you will find in time that [ biologists

and astronomers and physicists and all the rest of | that ungodly tribe of

science are just people like the rest of us."

"But coming in at three o'clock to see you. Expecting you'd be here."

"That's the way he lives," I said. "It wouldn't occur to him that the rest of

the world might live differently. That's the kind of man he is."

And that's the kind of man he was, all right.

He owned a watch, but he never used it except to time off the tests and

experiments he happened to be doing. He never, actually, knew what time of day

it was. When he got hungry, he scrounged up some food. When he couldn't keep

awake, he found a place to curl up and hammered off some sleep. When he had

finished what he was doing or, maybe, got discouraged, he'd set off for a

cabin that he owned on a lake up north and spend a day or week loafing.

He so consistently forgot to go to classes, so seldom turned up for scheduled

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THEYWALKEDLIKEMENCLIFFORDD.SIMAKAMANORBOOK.....1975ManorBooksInc.432ParkAvenueSouthNewYork,NewYork10016LibraryofCongressCatalogCardNumber:62-17362Copyright,©,1962,byCliffordD.Simak.'Allrightsreserved.PublishedbyarrangementwithDoubleday&Company,Inc.PrintedintheU.S.A.ScannedusingFineReader6.0Professio...

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