Clifford D. Simak - Kindergarten

VIP免费

2024-11-20 0 0 94.41KB 49 页 5.9玖币

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

Title : Kindergarten

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1953

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 : January 9, 2000

Prepared by : Anada Sucka

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

Kindergarten

Clifford D. Simak

He went walking in the morning before the Sun was up, down past the old, dilapidated barn that was

falling in upon itself, across the stream and up the slope of pasture ankle-deep with grass and summer

flowers, when the world was wet with dew and the chill edge of night still lingered in the air.

He went walking in the morning because he knew he might not have too many mornings left; any day,

the pain might close down for good and he was ready for it, he'd been ready for it for a long time now.

He was in no hurry. He took each walk as if it were his last and he did not want to miss a single thing

on any of the walks - the turned-up faces of the pasture roses with the tears of' dew running down their

checks or the matins of the birds in the thickets that ran along the ditches.

He found the machine alongside the path that ran through a thicket at the head of a ravine. At first

glance, he was irritated by it, for it was not only unfamiliar, but an incongruous thing as well, and he had

no room in heart or mind for anything but the commonplace. It had been the commonplace, the

expected, the basic reality of Earth and the life one lived on it that he had sought in coming to this

abandoned farm, seeking out a place where he might stand on ground of his own choosing to meet the

final day.

He stopped in the path and stood there, looking at this strange machine, feeling the roses and the dew

and the early morning bird song slip away from him, leaving him alone with this thing beside the path

which looked for all the world like some fugitive from a home appliance shop. But as he looked at it, he

began to see the little differences and he knew that here was nothing he'd ever seen before or heard of -

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (1 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

that it most certainly was not a wandering automatic washer or a delinquent dehumidifier.

For one thing, it shone - not with surface metallic lustre or the gleam of sprayed-on porcelain, but

with a shine that was all the way through whatever it was made of. If you looked at it just right, you got

the impression that you were seeing into it, though not clearly enough to be able to make out the shape

of any of its innards. It was rectangular, at a rough guess three feet by four by two, and it was without

knobs for one to turn or switches to snap on or dials to set - which suggested that it was not something

one was meant to operate.

He walked over to it and bent down and ran his hand along its top, without thinking why he should

reach out and touch it, knowing when it was too late that probably he should have left it alone. But it

seemed to be all right to touch it, for nothing happened - not right away, at least. The metal, or whatever

it was made of, was smooth to the hand and beneath the sleekness of its surface he seemed to sense a

terrible hardness and a frightening strength.

He took his hand away and straightened up, stepped back.

The machine clicked, just once, and he had the distinct impression that it clicked not because it had to

click to operate, not because it was turning itself on, hut to attract attention, to let him know that it was

an operating machine and that it had a function and was ready to perform it. And he got the impression

that for whatever purpose it might operate, it would do so with high efficiency and a minimum of noise.

Then it laid an egg.

Why he thought of it in just that way, he never was able to explain, even later when he had thought

about it.

But, anyhow, it laid an egg, and the egg was a piece of jade, green with milky whiteness running

through it, and exquisitely carved with what appeared to be outré symbolism.

He stood there in the path, looking at the jade, for a moment forgetting in his excitement how it had

materialized, caught up by the beauty of the jade itself and the superb workmanship that had wrought it

into shape. It was, he told himself, the finest piece that he had ever seen and he knew exactly how its

texture would feel beneath his fingers and just how expertly, upon close examination, he would find the

carving had been done.

He bent and picked it up and held it lovingly between his hands, comparing it with the pieces he had

known and handled for years in the museum. But now, even with the jade between his hands, the

museum was a misty place, far back along the corridors of time, although it had been less than three

months since he had walked away from it.

'Thank you,' he said to the machine and an instant later thought what a silly thing to do, talking to a

machine as if it were a person.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (2 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

The machine just sat there. It did not click again and it did not move.

So finally he left, walking back to the old farmhouse on the slope above the barn.

In the kitchen, he placed the jade in the centre of the table, where he could see it while he worked. He

kindled a fire in the stove and fed in split sticks of wood, not too large, to make quick heat. He put the

kettle on to warm and got dishes from the pantry and set his place. He fried bacon and drained it on

paper towelling and cracked the last of the eggs into the skillet.

He ate, staring at the jade that stood in front of him, admiring once again its texture, trying to puzzle

out the symbolism of its carving and finally wondering what it might be worth. Plenty, he thought -

although, of all considerations, that was the least important.

The carving puzzled him. It was in no tradition that he had ever seen or of which he had ever read.

What it was meant to represent, he could not imagine. And yet it had a beauty and a force, a certain

character, that tagged it as no haphazard doodling, but as the product of a highly developed culture.

He did not hear the young woman come up the steps and walk across the porch, but first knew that she

was there when she rapped upon the door frame. He looked up from the jade and saw her standing in the

open kitchen doorway and at first sight of her he found himself, ridiculously, thinking of her in the same

terms he had been thinking of the jade.

The jade was cool and green and she was crisp and white, but her eves, he thought, had the soft look

of this wondrous piece of jade about them, except that they were blue.

'Hello, Mr Chaye,' she said.

'Good morning,' he replied.

She was Mary Mallet, Johnny's sister.

'Johnny wanted to go fishing,' Mary told him. 'He and the little Smith boy. So I brought the milk and

eggs.'

'I am pleased you did,' said Peter, 'although you should not have bothered. I could have walked over

later. It would have done me good.'

He immediately regretted that last sentence, for it was something he was thinking too much lately -

that such and such an act or the refraining from an act would do him good when, as a matter of plain

fact, there was nothing that would help him at all. The doctors had made at least that much clear to him.

He took the eggs and milk and asked her in and went to place the milk in the cooler, for he had no

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (3 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

electricity for a refrigerator.

'Have you had breakfast?' he asked.

Mary said she had.

'It's just as well,' he said wryly. 'My cooking's pretty bad. I'm just camping out, you know.'

Arid regretted that one, too.

Chaye, he told himself, quit being so damn maudlin.

'What a pretty thing!' exclaimed Mary. 'Wherever did you get it?'

'The jade? Now, that's a funny thing. I found it.'

She reached a hand out for it.

'May I?'

'Certainly,' said Peter.

He watched her face as she picked it up and held it in both hands, carefully, as he had held it.

'You found this?'

'Well, I didn't exactly find it, Mary. It was given to me.'

'A friend?'

'I don't know.'

'That's a funny thing to say.'

'Not so funny. I'd like to show you the - well, the character who gave it to me. Have you got a minute?'

'Of course I have,' said Mary, 'although I'll have to hurry. Mother's canning peaches.'

They went down the slope together, past the barn, and crossed the creek to come into the pasture. As

they walked up the pasture, he wondered if they would find it there, if it still was there or ever had been

there.

It was.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (4 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

'What an outlandish thing!' said Mary.

'That's the word exactly,' Peter agreed.

'What is it, Mr Chaye?'

'I don't know.'

'You said you were given the jade. You don't mean...'

'But I do,' said Peter.

'They moved closer to the machine and stood watching it. Peter noticed once again the shine of it and

the queer sensation of being able to see into it - not very far, just part way, and not very well at that. But

still the metal or whatever it was could be seen into, and that was somehow uncomfortable.

Mary bent over and ran her fingers along its top.

'It feels all right,' she said. 'Just like porcelain or -'

'The machine clicked and a flacon lay upon the grass.

'For you,' said Peter.

'For me?'

Peter picked up the tiny bottle and handed it to her. It was a triumph of glassblower's skill and it shone

with sparkling prismatic colour in the summer sunlight.

'Perfume would be my guess,' he said. She worked the stopper loose.

'Lovely,' she breathed and held it out to him to smell. It was all of lovely.

She corked it up again.

'But, Mr Chaye...'

'I don't know,' said Peter. 'I simply do not know.'

'Not even a guess?' He shook his head.

'You just found it here.' 'I was out for a walk -'

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (5 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

'And it was waiting for you.'

'Well, now...' Peter began to object, but now that he thought about it, that seemed exactly right - he

had not found the machine; it had been waiting for him.

'It was, wasn't it?'

'Now that you mention it,' said Peter, 'yes, I guess it was waiting for me.'

Not for him specifically, perhaps, but for anyone who might come along the path. It had been waiting

to be found, waiting for a chance to go into its act, to do whatever it was supposed to do.

For now it appeared, as plain as day, that someone had left it there.

He stood in the pasture with Mary Mallet, farmer's daughter, standing by his side - with the familiar

grasses and the undergrowth and trees, with the shrill of locust screeching across the rising heat of day,

with the far-off tinkle of a cowbell - and felt the chill of the thought within his brain, the cold and

terrible thought backgrounded by the black of space and the dim endlessness of time. And he felt, as

well, a reaching out of something, of a chilly alien thing, towards the warmth of humanity and Earth.

'Let's go back,' he said.

They returned across the pasture to the house and stood for a moment at the gate.

'Isn't there something we should do?' asked Mary. 'Someone we should tell about it?'

He shook his head. 'I want to think about it first.'

'And do something about it?'

'There may be nothing that anyone can or should do.' He watched her go walking down the road, then

turned away and went back to the house.

He got out the lawn mower and cut the grass. After the lawn was mowed, he pottered in the flower-

bed. The zinnias were coming along fine, but something had got into the asters and they weren't doing

well. And the grass kept creeping in, he thought. No matter what he did, the grass kept creeping into the

bed to strangle out the plants.

After lunch, he thought, maybe I'll go fishing. Maybe going fishing will do me - He caught the

thought before he finished it.

He squatted by the flower-bed, dabbing at the ground with the point of his gardening trowel, and

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (6 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

thought about the machine out in the pasture.

I want to think about it, he'd told Mary, hut what was there to think about? Something that someone

had left in his pasture - a machine that clicked and laid a gift like an egg when you patted it.

What did that mean?

Why was it here?

Why did it click and hand out a gift when you patted it?

Response? The way a dog would wag its tail?

Gratitude? For being noticed by a human?

Negotiation?

Friendly gesture?

Booby trap?

And how had it known he would have sold his soul for a piece of jade one-half as fine as the piece it

had given him?

How had it known a girl would like perfume?

He heard the running footsteps behind him and swung around and there was Mary, running across the

lawn.

She reached him and went down on her knees beside him and her hands clutched his arm.

'Johnny found it, too,' she panted. 'I ran all the way. Johnny and that Smith boy found it. They cut

across the pasture coming home from fishing...'

'Maybe we should have reported it,' said Peter.

'It gave them something, too. A rod and reel to Johnny and a baseball bat and mitt to little Augie

Smith.'

'Oh, good Lord!'

'And now they're telling everyone.'

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (7 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

'It doesn't matter,' Peter said. 'At least, I don't suppose it matters.'

'What is that thing out there? You said you didn't know. But you have some idea. Peter, you must

have some idea.'

'I think it's alien,' Peter reluctantly and embarrassedly told her. 'It has a funny look about it, like

nothing I've ever seen or read about, and Earth machines don't give away things when you lay a hand on

them. You have to feed them coins first. This isn't - isn't from Earth.'

'From Mars, you mean?'

'Not from Mars,' said Peter. 'Not from this solar system. We have no reason to think another race of

high intelligence exists in this solar system and whoever dreamed up that machine had plenty of

intelligence.'

'But... not from this solar system...' 'From some other star.'

'The stars are so far away!' she protested.

So far away, thought Peter. So far out of the reach of the human race. Within the reach of dreams, but

not the reach of hands. So far away and so callous and uncaring. And the machine - 'Like a slot

machine,' he said, 'except it always pays in jackpots and you don't even need a coin. That is crazy, Mary.

That's one reason it isn't of this Earth. No Earth machine, no Earth inventor, would do that.'

'The neighbours will be coming,' Mary said.

'I know they will. They'll be coming for their handouts.'

'But it isn't very big. It could not carry enough inside it for the entire neighbourhood. It does not have

much more than room enough for the gifts it's already handed out.'

'Mary, did Johnny want a rod and reel?'

'He'd talked of practically nothing else.'

'And you like perfume?'

'I'd never had any good perfume. Just cheap stuff.' She laughed nervously. 'And you? Do you like

jade?'

'I'm what you might call a minor expert on it. It's a passion with me.'

'Then that machine...'

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (8 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

'Gives each one the thing he wants,' Peter finished for her.

'It's frightening,' said Mary.

And it seemed strange that anything at all could be frightening on such a day as this - a burnished

summer day, with white clouds rimming the western horizon and the sky the colour of pale blue silk, a

day that had no moods, but was as commonplace as the cornfield earth.

After Mary had left, Peter went in the house and made his lunch. He sat by the window, eating it, and

watched the neighbours come. They came by twos and threes, tramping across the pasture from all

directions, coming to his pasture from their own farms, leaving the haying rigs and the cultivators,

abandoning their work in the middle of the day to see the strange machine. They stood around and

talked, tramping down the thicket where he had found the machine, and at times their high, shrill voices

drifted across to him, but he could not make out what they said, for the words were flattened and

distorted by the distance.

From the stars, he'd said. From some place among the stars.

And if that be fantasy, he said, I have a right to it.

First contact, he thought. And clever!

Let an alien being arrive on Earth and the women would run screaming for their homes and the men

would grab their rifles and there'd be hell to pay.

But a machine - that was a different matter. What if it was a little different? What if it acted a little

strangely? After all, it was only a machine. It was something that could be understood.

And if it handed out free gifts, that was all the better.

After lunch, he went out and sat on the steps and some of the neighbours came and showed him what

the machine had given them. 'They sat around and talked, all of them excited and mystified, but not a

single one of them was scared.

Among the gifts were wrist-watches and floor lamps, typewriters and fruit juicers, sets of dishes,

chests of silver, bolts of drapery materials, shoes, shotguns, carving sets, book ends, neckties, and many

other items. One youngster had a dozen skunk traps and another had a bicycle.

A modern Pandora's box, thought Peter, made by an alien intelligence and set clown upon the Earth.

Apparently the word was spreading, for now the people came in cars. Some of them parked by the

road and walked down to the pasture and others came into the barnyard and parked there, not bothering

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk...nten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (9 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt

to ask for permission.

After a time, they would come back loaded with their loot and drive away. Out in the pasture was a

milling throng of people. Peter, watching it, was reminded of a county fair or a village carnival.

By chore-time, the last of them had gone, even the neighbours who had come to say a few words with

him and to show him what they'd gotten, so he left the house and walked up the pasture slope.

The machine still was there and it was starting to build something. It had laid out around it a sort of

platform of a stone that looked like marble, as if it were laying a foundation for a building. The

foundation was about ten feet by twelve and was set level against the pasture's slope, with footings of the

same sort of stone going down into the ground.

He sat down on a stump a little distance away and looked out over the peace of the countryside. It

seemed more beautiful, more quiet and peaceful than it had ever seemed before, and he sat there

contentedly, letting the evening soak into his soul.

The sun had set not more than half an hour ago. The western sky was a delicate lemon fading into

green, with here and there the pink of wandering clouds, while beneath the horizon the land lay in the

haze of a blue twilight, deepening at the edges. The liquid evensong of birds ran along the hedges and

the thickets and the whisper of swallows' wings came down from overhead.

This is Earth, he thought, the peaceful, human Earth, a landscape shaped by an agricultural people.

This is the Earth of plum blossom and of proud red barns and of corn rows as straight as rifle barrels.

For millions of years, the Earth had lain thus, without interference; a land of soil and life, a local

corner of the Galaxy engaged in its own small strivings.

And now?

Now, finally, there was interference.

Now, finally, someone or something had come into this local corner of the Galaxy and Earth was

alone no longer.

'To himself, he knew, it did not matter. Physically, there was no longer anything that possibly could

matter to him. All that was left was the morning brightness and the evening peace and from each of

these, from every hour of each day that was left to him, it was his purpose to extract the last bit of joy in

being alive.

But to the others it would matter - to Mary Mallet and her brother Johnny, to the little Smith boy who

had got the baseball bat and mitt, to all the people who had visited this pasture, and to all the millions

who had not visited or even heard of it.

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswij...ten/spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Simak%20-%20Kindergarten.txt (10 of 49)20-2-2006 23:09:49

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

摘要：

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documente /spaar/Clifford%20D.%20Sim...

展开>> 收起<<

Clifford D. Simak - Kindergarten.pdf

共49页,预览10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 - Kindergarten

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: