Clifford D. Simak - Huddling Place

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 30.38KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

HUDDLING PLACE

by Clifford D. Simak

The drizzle sifted from the leaden skies, like smoke drifting through the

bare-branched trees. It softened the hedges and hazed the outlines of the

buildings and blotted out the distance. It glinted on the metaffic skins of

the silent robots and silvered the shoulders of the three humans listening to

the intonations of the black-garbed man, who read from the book cupped between

his hands.

“For I am the Resurrection and the Life—”

The moss-mellowed graven figure that reared above the door of the crypt

seemed straining upward, every crystal of its yearning body reaching toward

something that no one else could see. Straining as it had strained since that

day of long ago when men had chipped it from the gram. ite to adorn the family

tomb with a symbolism that had pleased the first John J., Webster in the last

years he held of life.

“And whosoever liveth and belleveth in Me—”

Jerome A. Webster felt his son’s fingers tighten on his arm, heard the

muffled sobbing of his mother, saw the lines of robots standing rigid, heads

bowed in respect to the master they had served. The master who now was. going

home—to the final home of all.

Numbly, Jerome A. Webster wondered if they understood—if they understood

life and death—if they understood what it meant that Nelson F. Webs~er lay

there in the casket, that a man with a book intoned words above him.

Nelson F. Webster, fourth of the line of Websters who

had lived on these acres, had lived and died here, scarcely leaving, and now

was going to his final rest in that place the first of them had prepared for

the rest of them—for that long line of shadowy descendants who would live here

and cherish the things and the ways and the life that the first John J.

Webster had established.

Jerome A. Webster felt his jaw muscles tighten, felt a little tremor run

across his body. For a moment his eyes burned and the casket blurred in his

sight and the words the man in black was saying were one with the wind that

whispered in the pines standing sentinel for the dead. Within his brain

remembrance marched—remembrance of a gray-haired man stalking the hills and

fields, sniffing the breeze of an early morning, standing, legs braced, before

the flaring fireplace with a glass of brandy in his hand.

Pride—the pride of land and life, and the humility and greatness that

quiet living breeds within a man. Contentmeat of casual leisure and surety of

purpose. Independence of assured security, comfort of familiar surroundings,

freedom of broad acres.

Thomas Webster was joggling his elbow. “Father,” he was whispering.

“Father.”

The service was over. The black-garbed man had closed his book. Six

robots stepped forward, lifted the casket

Slowly the three followed the casket into the crypt, stood silently as

the robots slid it into its receptacle, closed the tiny door and affixed the

plate that read:

NELSON F. WEBSTER

2034—2117

That was all. Just the name and dates. And that, Jerome A. Webster found

himself thinking, was enough. There was nothing else that needed to be there.

That was all those others had. The ones that called the family roll

—starting with William Stevens, 1920-1999. (hemp Stevens, they had called him,

Webster remembered. Father of the wife of that first John J. Webster, who was

here bimself—1951-2020. And after him his son, Charles F. Webster, 1980—20(~0.

And his son, John J. II, 2004—2086. Webster could remember John J. IJ—a

grandfather who

had slept beside the fire with his, pipe hanging from his mouth, eternally

threatening to set his whiskers aflame.

Webster’s eyes strayed to another plate. Mary Webster, the mother of the

boy here at his side. And yet not a boy. He kept forgetting that Thomas was

twenty now,—’in a week or so would be leaving for Mars, even as in his younger

days he, too, had gone to Mars.

All here together, he told himself. The Websters and their wives and

children. Here in death together as they had lived together, sleeping in the

pride and security of bronze and marble with the pines outside and the synlo

bolic figure above the age-greened door.

The robots were waiting, standing silently, their. task fulfilled.

His mother looked at him.

“You’re the head of the family now, my son,” she told

He reached out and hugged her close against his side. Head of the

family—what was left of it. Just the three of them now. His mother an, his

son. And his son would be leaving soon, going out to Mars. But he would come

back. Come back with a wife, perhaps, and the family would go on. The family

would&t stay at three. Most of the big house wouldn’t stay closed off, as it

now was closed off. There had been a time when it had rung with the life of a

dozen units of the family, living in their separató apartments under one big

roof. That time, -he knew, would come again.

The three of them turned and left the crypt, took the path back to the

house, looming like a huge gray shadow

inthemidst. - -

A fire blazed in the hearth and the book lay upon his desk. Jerome A.

Webster reached out and picked it up, read the title once again:

“Martian Physiology, With Especial Reference to the Brain” by Jerome A.

Webster, M.D.

Thick and authoritative—the work of a lifetime. Standing almost alone in

its field. Based upon the data gathered during those five plague years on

Mars—years when he had labored almost day and night with his fellow colleagues

of the World Committee’s medical commission,

dispatched on an errand of mercy to. the neighboring planet.

A tap sounded on the door.

“Come in,” he called.

The door opened and a robot glided in.

“Your whiskey, sir.”

“Thank you, Jenkins,” Webster said.

“The minister, sir,” said Jenkins, “has left.”

“Oh, yes. I presume that you took care of him.”

“I did, sir. Gave him the usual fee and offered him a drink. He refused

the drink.”

“That was a social error,” Webster told him. “Ministers don’t drink.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know. He asked me to ask you to come to church

sometime.”

“Eh?”

‘9 told him, sir, that- you never went anywhere.”

“That was quite right, Jenkins,” said Webster. “None of us ever go

anywhere.”

Jenkins headed for the door, stopped before he got there, turned around.

“If I may say so, sir, that was a touching service at the crypt. Your father

was a fine human, the finest ever was. The robots Were saying the service was

very fitting. Dignified like, sir. He would have liked it had he known.”

“My father,” said Webster, “would be even more

pleased to hear you say that, Jenkins.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jenkins, and went out.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Clifford D. Simak - Huddling Place.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Clifford D. Simak - Huddling Place

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: