Clifford D. Simak - The Golden Bugs

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Title : The Golden Bugs

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1960

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 20, 2000

Prepared by : Anada Sucka

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

The Golden Bugs

Clifford D. Simak

It started as a lousy day.

Arthur Belsen, across the alley, turned on his orchestra at six o'clock and brought me sitting up in bed.

I'm telling you, Belsen makes his living as an engineer, but music is his passion. And since he is an

engineer, he's not content to leave well enough alone. He had to mess around.

A year or two before he'd had the idea of a robotic symphony, and the man has talent, you have to

give him that. He went to work on this idea and designed machines that could read--not only play, but

read--music from a tape, and he built a machine to transcribe the tapes. Then he built a lot of these music

machines in his basement workshop.

And he tried them out!

It was experimental work, quite understandably, and there was redesigning and adjusting to be done,

and Belsen was finicky about the performance that each machine turned out. So he tried them out a lot--

and loudly--not being satisfied until he had the instrumentation just the way he thought it should be.

There had been some idle talk in the neighborhood about a lynching party, but nothing came of it.

That's the trouble, one of the troubles, with this neighborhood of ours--they'll talk an arm off you, but

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never do a thing.

As yet no one could see an end to all the Belsen racket. It had taken him better than a year to work up

the percussion section and that was bad enough. But now he'd started on the strings and that was even

worse.

Helen sat up in bed beside me and put her hands up to her ears, but she couldn't keep from hearing.

Belsen had it turned up loud, to get, as he would tell you, the feel of it.

By this time, I figured, he probably had the entire neighborhood awake.

'Well, that's it," I said, starting to get up.

"You want me to get breakfast?"

"You might as well," I said. "No one's going to get any sleep with that thing turned on."

While she started breakfast, I headed for the garden back of the garage to see how the dahlias might

be faring. I don't mind telling you I was delighted with those dahlias. It was nearly fair time and there

were some of them that would be at bloom perfection just in time for showing.

I started for the garden, but I never got there. That's the way it is in this neighborhood. A man will

start to do something and never get it done because someone always catches him and wants to talk a

while.

This time it was Dobby. Dobby is Dr. Darby Wells, a venerable old codger with white chin whiskers,

and he lives next door. We all call him Dobby and he doesn't mind a bit, for in a way it's a badge of

tribute to the man. At one time Dobby had been an entomologist of some repute at the university and it

had been his students who had hung the name on him. It was no corruption of his regular name, but

stemmed rather from his one-time interest in mud-dauber wasps.

But now Dobby was retired, with nothing in the world to do except hold long and aimless

conversations with anyone he could manage to nail down.

As soon as I caught sight of him, I knew I was sunk.

"I think it's admirable," said Dobby, leaning on his fence and launching into full-length discussion as

soon as I was in voice distance, "for a man to have a hobby. But I submit it's inconsiderate of him to

practice it so noisily at the crack of dawn."

"You mean that," I said, making a thumb at the Belsen house, from which the screeching and the

caterwauling still issued in full force.

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"Exactly," said Dobby, combing his white chin whiskers with an air of grave deliberation. "Now,

mind me, not for a moment would I refuse the man the utmost admiration--"

"Admiration?' I demanded. There are occasions when I have a hard time understanding Dobby. Not so

much because of the pontifical way in which be talks as because of the way he thinks.

"Precisely;" Debby told me. "Not for his machines, although they are electronic marvels, but for the

way in which he engineers his tapes. The machine that he rigged up to turn out those tapes is a most

versatile contraption. Sometimes it seems to be almost human."

"When I was a boy," I said, "we had player pianos and the pianos ran on tapes."

"Yes, Randall, you are right," admitted Dobby; "the principle was there, but the execution--think of

the execution. All those old pianos had to do was tinkle merrily along, but Belsen has worked into his

tapes the most delicate nuances."

"I must have missed them nuances," I told him, without any charity at all. "All I've heard is racket."

We talked about Belsen and his orchestra until Helen called me in for breakfast.

I had no sooner sat down than she dragged out her grievance list.

"Randall," she said, with determination, "the kitchen is positively crawling with grease ants again.

They're so small you can hardly see them and all at once they're into everything."

"I thought you got rid of them," I said.

"I did. I tracked them to their nest and poured boiling water into it. But this time it's up to you."

"Sure thing," I promised. "I'll do it right away."

"That's what you said last time."

"I was ready to," I told her, "but you beat me to it."

"And that isn't all," she said. "There are those wasps up in the attic louvers. They stung the little

Montgomery girl the other day."

She was getting ready to say more, but just then Billy, our eleven year old, came stumbling down the

stairs.

"Look, Dad," he cried excitedly, holding out a small-size plastic box. "I have one here I've never seen

before."

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I didn't have to ask one what. I knew it was another insect. Last year it had been stamp collecting and

this year it was insects--and that's another thing about having an idle entomologist for a next door

neighbor.

I took the box without enthusiasm.

"A ladybug," I said.

"No, it's not," said Billy. "It's too big to be a ladybug. And the spots are different and the color is all

wrong. This one is gold and a ladybug is orange."

"Well, look it up," I said, impatiently. The kid will do anything to keep away from reading.

"I did," said Billy. "I looked all through the book and I couldn't find it."

"Oh, for goodness sakes," snapped Helen, "sit down and eat your breakfast. It's bad enough to be

overrun with ants and wasps without you spending all your time catching other bugs."

"But, Mom, it's educational," protested Billy. "That's what Dr. Wells says. He says there are seven

hundred thousand known families of insects..."

"Where did you find it, son?" I asked, a bit ashamed of how we both were jumping on him.

"Right in my room," said Billy.

"In the house!" screamed Helen. "Ants aren't bad enough..."

"Soon as I get through eating, I'll show it to Dr. Wells."

"Now, don't you pester Dobby."

"I hope he pesters him a lot," Helen said, tight-lipped. "It was Dobby who got him started on this

foolishness."

I handed back the box and Billy put it down beside his plate and started in on breakfast.

"Randall," Helen said, taking up her third point of complaint. "I don't know what I'm going to do with

Nora."

Nora was the cleaning woman. She came in twice a week.

"What did she do this time?"

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"It's what she doesn't do. She simply will not dust. She just waves a cloth around and that's all there is

to it. She won't move a lamp or vase."

"Well, get someone else," I said.

"Randall, you don't know what you're talking about. Cleaning women are hard to find and you can't

depend on them. I was talking to Amy..."

I listened and made the appropriate replies. I've heard it all before.

As soon as I finished breakfast, I took off for the office. It was too early to see any prospects, but I

had some policies to write up and some other work to do and I could use the extra hour or two.

Helen phoned me shortly after noon and she was exasperated.

"Randall," she said, without preamble, "someone has dumped a boulder in the middle of the garden."

"Come again?" I said.

"You know. A big rock. It squashed down all the dahlias."

"Dahlias!" I yipped.

"And the funny thing about it is there aren't any tracks. It would take a truck to move a rock that big

and..."

"Now, let's take this easy. How big, exactly, is this boulder?"

"It's almost as tall as I am."

"It's impossible!" I stormed. Then I tried to calm myself, "It's a joke," I said. "Someone played a joke."

I searched my mind for someone who might have done it and I couldn't think of anyone who'd go to

all the trouble involved in that sort of joke. There was George Montgomery, but George was a

sobersides. And Belsen, but Belsen was too wrapped up in music to be playing any jokes. And Dobby--it

was inconceivable he'd ever play a joke.

"Some joke!" said Helen.

Nobody in the neighborhood, I told myself, would have done a trick like that, Everyone knew I was

counting on those dahlias to win me some more ribbons.

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"I'll knock off early," I told her, "and see what can be done about it."

Although I knew there was precious little that could be done about it--just haul the thing away.

"I'll be over at Amy's," Helen said. "I'll try to get home early."

I went out and saw another prospect, but I didn't do too well. All the time I was thinking of the dahlias.

I knocked off work in the middle of the afternoon and bought a spray-can of insecticide at a drugstore.

The label claimed it was effective against ants, roaches, wasps, aphids and a host of other pests.

At home, Billy was sitting on the steps.

"Hello, son. Nothing much to do?"

"Me and Tommy Henderson played soldier for a while, but we got tired of it."

I put the insecticide on the kitchen table, then headed for the garden. Billy trailed listlessly behind me.

The boulder was there, squarely in the middle of the dahlia patch, and every bit as big as Helen said it

was. It was a funny looking thing, not just a big slab-sided piece of rock, but a freckled looking job. It

was a washed out red and almost a perfect globe.

I walked around it, assessing the damage. There were a few of the dahlias left, but the better ones

were gone. There were no tracks, no indication of how the rock might have gotten where it was. It lay a

good thirty feet from the alleyway and someone might have used a crane to hoist it off a truck bed, but

that seemed most unlikely, for a heavy nest of utility wires ran along the alley.

I went up to the boulder and had a good, close look at it. The whole face of it was pitted with small,

irregular holes, none of them much deeper than half an inch, and there were occasional smooth patches,

with the darker luster showing, as if some part of the original surface had been knocked off, The darker,

smoother patches had the shine of highly polished wax, and I remembered something from very long

ago--when a onetime pal of mine had been a momentary rock collector.

I bent a little closer to one of the smooth, waxy surfaces and it seemed to me that I could see the hint

of wavy lines running in the stone.

"Billy," I asked, "would you know an agate if you saw one?"

"Gosh, Dad, I don't know. But Tommy would. He is a sort of rockhound. He's hunting all the time for

different kinds of rocks."

He came up close and looked at one of the polished surfaces. He wet his thumb against his tongue and

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rubbed it across the waxy surface to bring out the satin of the stone.

"I don't know," he said, "but I think it is."

He backed off a ways and stared at the boulder with a new respect.

"Say, Dad, if it really is an agate--if it is one big agate, I mean, it would be worth a lot of money,

wouldn't it?" '

"I don't know. I suppose it might be."

"A million dollars, maybe."

I shook my head. "Not a million dollars."

"I'll go get Tommy, right away," he said.

He went around the garage like a flash and I could hear him running down the driveway, hitting out

for Tommy's place.

I walked around the boulder several times and tried to estimate its weight, but I had no knowledge I

could go on.

I went back to the house and read the directions on the can of insecticide. I uncapped and tested it and

the sprayer worked.

So I got down on my knees in front of the threshold of the kitchen door and tried to find the path the

ants were using to come in. I couldn't see any of them right away, but I knew from past experience that

they are little more than specks and almost transparent in the bargain and mighty hard to see.

A glittery motion in one corner of the kitchen caught my eye and I wheeled around. A glob of golden

shimmer was running on the floor, keeping close to the baseboard and heading for the cabinet

underneath the kitchen sink.

It was another of the outsize ladybugs.

I aimed the squirt can at it and let it have a burst, but it kept right on and vanished underneath the

cabinet.

With the bug gone, I resumed looking for the ants and found no sign of them. There were none

coming in the door. Or going out, for that matter. There were none on the sink or the work table space.

So I went around the corner of the house to size up Operation Wasp. It would be a sticky one, I knew.

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The nest was located in the attic louver and would be hard to get at. Standing off and looking at it, I

decided the only thing to do was wait until night, when I could be sure all the wasps were in the nest.

Then I'd put up a ladder and climb up and let them have it, then get out as fast as I could manage without

breaking my fool neck.

It was a piece of work that I frankly had no stomach for, but I knew from the tone of Helen's voice at

the breakfast table there was no ducking it.

There were a few wasps flying around the nest, and as I watched a couple of them dropped out of the

nest and tumbled to the ground.

Wondering what was going on, I stepped a little closer and then I saw the ground was littered with

dead or dying wasps. Even as I watched, another wasp fell down and lay there, twisting and squirming.

I circled around a bit to try to get a better look at whatever might be happening. But I could make out

nothing except that every now and then another wasp fell down.

I told myself it was all right with me. If something was killing off the wasps it would save me the job

of getting rid of them.

I was turning around to take the insecticide back to the kitchen when Billy and Tommy Henderson

came panting in excitement from the backyard.

"Mr. Marsden," Tommy said, "that rock out there is an agate. It's a banded agate."

"Well, now, that's fine," I said.

"But you don't understand," cried Tommy. "No agate gets that big. Especially not a banded agate.

They call them Lake Superior agates and they don't ever get much bigger than your fist."

That did it. I jerked swiftly to attention and went pelting around the house to have another look at the

boulder in the garden. The boys came pounding on behind me.

That boulder was a lovely thing. I put out my hand and stroked it. I thought how lucky I was that

someone had plopped it in my garden. I had forgotten all about the dahlias.

"I bet you," Tommy told me, his eyes half as big as saucers, "that you could get a lot of money for it."

I won't deny that approximately the same thought had been going through my mind.

I put out my hand and pushed against it, just to get the solid and substantial feel of it.

And as I pushed, it rocked slightly underneath the pressure!

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Astonished, I pushed a little harder, and it rocked again.

Tommy stood bug-eyed. "That's funny, Mr. Marsden. By rights, it hadn't ought to move. It must

weigh several tons. You must be awfully strong."

"I'm not strong," I told him. "Not as strong as that." I tottered back to the house and put away the

insecticide, then went out and sat down on the steps to do some worrying.

There was no sign of the boys. They probably had run swiftly off to spread the news through the

neighborhood.

If that thing was an agate, as Tommy said it was--if it really was one tremendous agate, then it would

be a fantastic museum piece and might command some money. But if it was an agate, why was it so

light? No ten men, pushing on it, should have made it budge.

I wondered, too, just what my rights would be if it should actually turn out to be an agate. It was on

my property and it should be mine. But what if someone came along and claimed it?

And there was this other thing: How had it gotten there to start with?

I was all tied up in knots with my worrying when Dobby came trundling around the corner of the

house and sat down on the steps beside me.

"Lots of extraordinary things going on," he said. "I hear you have an agate boulder in the garden."

"That's what Tommy Henderson tells me. I suppose that he should know. Billy tells me he's a

rockhound."

Dobby scratched at his whiskers. "Great things, hobbies," he said. "Especially for kids. They learn a

lot from them,"

"Yeah," I said without enthusiasm.

"Your son brought me an insect for identification after breakfast this morning."

"I told him not to bother you."

"I am glad he brought it," Dobby said. "It was one I'd never seen before."

"It looked like a ladybug."

"Yes," Dobby agreed, "there is _some_ resemblance. But I'm not entirely certain--well, fact of the

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matter is, I'm not even sure that it is an insect. To tell the truth, it resembles a turtle in many ways more

than it does an insect. There is an utter lack of bodily segmentation, such as you'd find in any insect. The

exoskeleton is extremely hard and the head and legs are retractible and it has no antennae."

He shook his head in some perplexity. "I can't be sure, of course. Much more extensive examination

would be necessary before an attempt could be made at classifying it You didn't happen to find any more

of them, did your'

"I saw one running on the floor not so long ago."

"Would you mind, next time you see one, grabbing it for me?"

"Not at all," I said. "I'll try to get you one."

I kept my word. After he left I went down into the basement to look up a bug for him. I saw several of

them, but couldn't catch a one. I gave up in disgust.

After supper, Arthur Belsen came popping from across the alley. He was in a dither, but that was not

unusual. He is a birdlike, nervous man and it doesn't take too much to get him all upset.

"I hear that boulder in your garden is an agate," he said to me. "What do you intend to do with it?"

"Why, I don't know. Sell it, I suppose, if anyone wants to buy it."

"It might be valuable," said Belsen. "You can't just leave it out there. Someone might come along and

pinch it."

"Guess there's nothing else to do," I told him. "I certainly can't move it and I'm not going to sit up all

night to guard it."

"You don't need to sit up all night," said Belsen. "I can fix it for you. We can rig up a nest of trip

wires and hook up an alarm."

I wasn't too impressed and tried to discourage him, but he was like a beagle on a rabbit trail. He went

back to his basement and came out with a batch of wire and a kit of tools and we fell to work.

We worked until almost bedtime getting the wires rigged up and an alarm bell installed just inside the

kitchen door. Helen took a sour view of it. She didn't like the idea of messing up her kitchen, agate or no

agate.

In the middle of the night the clamor of the bell jerked me out of bed, wondering what all the racket

was. Then I remembered and went rushing for the stairs. On the third step from the bottom I stepped on

something that rolled beneath my foot and sent me pitching down the stairs into the living room. I fell

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