Clifford D. Simak - Good Night, Mr. James

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Title: Good night, Mr. James
Author: Clifford D. Simak
Original copyright year: 1951
Genre: science fiction
Comments: To my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this story.
Source: scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge Pro 9.0, proofread in
MS Word 2000.
Date of e-text: August 18, 1999
Prepared by: Anada Sucka
Anticopyright 1999. All rights reversed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
GOOD NIGHT, MR. JAMES
Clifford D. Simak
I
HE CAME ALIVE from nothing. He became aware from unawareness.
He smelled the air of the night and heard the trees whispering on the embankment above him and the
breeze that had set the trees to whispering came down to him and felt him over with soft and tender
fingers, for all the world as if it were examining him for broken bones or contusions and abrasions.
He sat up and put both his palms down upon the ground beside him to help him sit erect and stared
into the darkness. Memory came slowly and when it came it was incomplete and answered nothing.
His name was Henderson James and he was a human being and he was sitting somewhere on a planet
that was called the Earth. He was thirty-six years old and he was, in his own way, famous, and
comfortably well-off. He lived in an old ancestral home on Summit avenue, which was a respectable
address even if it had lost some of its smartness in the last twenty years or so.
On the road above the slope of the embankment a car went past with its tires whining on the pavement
and for a moment its headlights made the treetops glow. Far away, muted by the distance, a whistle cried
out. And somewhere else a dog was barking with a flat viciousness.
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His name was Henderson James and if that were true, why was he here? Why should Henderson
James be sitting on the slope of an embankment, listening to the wind in the trees and to a wailing
whistle and a barking dog? Something had gone wrong, some incident that, if he could but remember it,
might answer all his questions.
There was a job to do.
He sat and stared into the night and found that he was shivering, although there was no reason why he
should, for the night was not that cold. Beyond the embankment he heard the sounds of a city late at
night, the distant whine of the speeding car and the far-off wind-broken screaming of a siren. Once a
man walked along a street close by and James sat listening to his footsteps until they faded out of
hearing.
Something had happened and there was a job to do, a job that he had been doing, a job that somehow
had been strangely interrupted by the inexplicable incident which had left him lying here on this
embankment.
He checked himself. Clothing... shorts and shirt, strong shoes, his wristwatch and the gun in the
holster at his side.
A gun?
The job involved a gun.
He had been hunting in the city, hunting something that required a gun. Something that was prowling
in the night and a thing that must be killed.
Then he knew the answer, but even as he knew it he sat for a moment wondering at the strange,
methodical, step-by-step progression of reasoning that had brought him to the memory. First his name
and the basic facts pertaining to himself, then the realization of where he was and the problem of why he
happened to be there and finally the realization that he had a gun and that it was meant to be used. It was
a logical way to think, a primer schoolbook way to work it out:
I am a man named Henderson James.
I live in a house on Summit avenue.
Am I in the house on Summit avenue?
No, I am not in the house on Summit avenue.
I am on an embankment somewhere.
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Why am I on the embankment?
But it wasn't the way a man thought, at least not the normal way a normal man would think. Man
thought in shortcuts. He cut across the block and did not go all the way around.
It was a frightening thing, he told himself, this clear-around-the-block thinking. It wasn't normal and it
wasn't right and it made no sense at all... no more sense than did the fact that he should find himself in a
place with no memory of getting there.
He rose to his feet and ran his hands up and down his body. His clothes were neat, not rumpled. He
hadn't been beaten up and he hadn't been thrown from a speeding car.
There were no sore places on his body and his face was unbloody and whole and he felt all right.
He hooked his fingers in the holster belt and shucked it up so that it rode tightly on his hips. He pulled
out the gun and checked it with expert and familiar fingers and the gun was ready.
He walked up the embankment and reached the road, went across it with a swinging stride to reach the
sidewalk that fronted the row of new bungalows. He heard a car coming and stepped off the sidewalk to
crouch in a clump of evergreens that landscaped one corner of a lawn. The move was instinctive and he
crouched there, feeling just a little foolish at the thing he'd done.
The car went past and no one saw him. They would not, he now realized, have noticed him even if he
had remained out on the sidewalk.
He was unsure of himself; that must be the reason for his fear. There was a blank spot in his life, some
mysterious incident that he did not know and the unknowing of it had undermined the sure and solid
foundation of his own existence, had wrecked the basis of his motive and had turned him, momentarily,
into a furtive animal that darted and hid at the approach of his fellow men.
That and something that had happened to him that made him think clear around the block.
He remained crouching in the evergreens, watching the street and the stretch of sidewalk, conscious of
the white-painted, ghostly bungalows squatting back in their landscaped lots.
A word came into his mind. Puudly. An odd word, unearthly, yet it held terror.
The puudly had escaped and that was why he was here, hiding on the front lawn of some unsuspecting
and sleeping citizen, equipped with a gun and a determination to use it, ready to match his wits and the
quickness of brain and muscle against the most bloodthirsty, hate-filled thing yet found in the Galaxy.
The puudly was dangerous. It was not a thing to harbor. In fact, there was a law against harboring not
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only a puudly, but certain other alien beasties even less lethal than a puudly. There was good reason for
such a law, reason which no one, much less himself, would ever think to question.
And now the puudly was loose and somewhere in the city.
James grew cold at the thought of it, his brain forming images of the things that might come to pass if
he did not hunt down the alien beast and put an end to it.
Although beast was not quite the word to use. The puudly was more than a beast... just how much
more than a beast he once had hoped to learn. He had not learned a lot, he now admitted to himself, not
nearly all there was to learn, but he had learned enough. More than enough to frighten him.
For one thing, he had learned what hate could be and how shallow an emotion human hate turned out
when measured against the depth and intensity and the ravening horror of the puudly's hate. Not
unreasoning hate, for unreasoning hate defeats itself, but a rational, calculating, driving hate that
motivated a clever and deadly killing machine which directed its rapacity and its cunning against every
living thing that was not a puudly.
For the beast had a mind and a personality that operated upon the basic law of self-preservation
against all corners, whoever they might be, extending that law to the interpretation that safety lay in one
direction only... the death of every other living being. No other reason was needed for a puudly's killing.
The fact that anything else lived and moved and was thus posing a threat, no matter how remote, against
a puudly, was sufficient reason in itself.
It was psychotic, of course, some murderous instinct planted far back in time and deep in the
creature's racial consciousness, but no more psychotic, perhaps, than many human instincts.
The puudly had been, and still was for that matter, a unique opportunity for a study in alien
behaviorism. Given a permit, one could have studied them on their native planet. Refused a permit, one
sometimes did a foolish thing, as James had.
And foolish acts backfire, as this one did.
James put down a hand and patted the gun at his side, as if by doing so he might derive some
assurance that he was equal to the task. There was no question in his mind as to the thing that must be
done. He must find the puudty and kill it and he must do that before the break of dawn.
Anything less than that would be abject and horrifying failure.
For the puudly would bud. It was long past its time for the reproductive act and there were bare hours
left to find it before it had loosed upon the Earth dozens of baby puudlies. They would not remain babies
for long. A few hours after budding they would strike out on their own. To find one puudly, lost in the
vastness of a sleeping city, seemed bad enough; to track down some dozens of them would be
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impossible.
So it was tonight or never.
Tonight there would be no killing on the puudly's part, Tonight the beast would be intent on one thing
only, to find a place where it could rest in quiet, where it could give itself over, wholeheartedly and with
no interference, to the business of bringing other puudlies into being.
It was clever. It would have known where it was going before it had escaped. There would be, on its
part, no time wasted in seeking or in doubling back. It would have known where it was going and
already it was there, already the buds would be rising on its body, bursting forth and growing.
There was one place, and one place only, in the entire city where an alien beast would be safe, from
prying eyes. A man could figure that one out and so could a puudly. The question was: Would the
puudly know that man could figure it out? Would the puudly underestimate a man? Or, knowing that the
man would know it, too, would it find another place of hiding?
James rose from the evergreens and went down the sidewalk. The street marker at the corner, standing
underneath a swinging street light, told him where he was and it was closer to the place where he was
going than he might have hoped.
II
The zoo was quiet for a while, and then something sent up a howl that raised James' hackles and made
his blood stop in his veins.
James, having scaled the fence, stood tensely at its foot, trying to identify the howling animal. He was
unable to place it. More than likely, he told himself, it was a new one. A person simply couldn't keep
track of all the zoo's occupants. New ones were coming in all the time, strange, unheard of creatures
from the distant stars.
Straight ahead lay the unoccupied moat cage that up until a day or two before had held an
unbelievable monstrosity from the jungles of one of the Arctian worlds. James grimaced in the dark,
remembering the thing. They had finally had to kill it.
And now the puudly was there... well, maybe not there, but one place that it could be, the one place in
the entire city where it might be seen and arouse no comment, for the zoo was filled with animals that
were seldom seen and another strange one would arouse only momentary wonder.
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One animal more would go unnoticed unless some zoo attendant should think to check the records.
There, in that unoccupied cage area, the puudly would be undisturbed, could quietly go about its
business of budding out more puudlies. No one would bother it, for things like puudlies were the normal
occupants of this place set aside for the strangers brought to Earth to be stared at and studied by that
ferocious race, the humans.
James stood quietly beside the fence.
Henderson James. Thirty-six. Unmarried. Alien psychologist. An official of this zoo. And an offender
against the law for having secured and harbored an alien being that was barred from Earth.
Why, he asked himself, did he think of himself in this way? Why, standing here, did he catalogue
himself? It was instinctive to know one's self... there was no need, no sense of setting up a mental
outline of one's self.
It had been foolish to go ahead with this puudly business. He recalled how he had spent days fighting
it out with himself, reviewing all the disastrous possibilities which might arise from it. If the old
renegade spaceman had not come to him and had not said, over a bottle of most delicious Lupan wine,
that he could deliver, for a certain, rather staggering sum, one live puudly, in good condition, it never
would have happened.
James was sure that of himself he never would have thought of it. But the old space captain was a man
he knew and admired from former dealings. He was a man who was not averse to turning either an
honest or a dishonest dollar, and yet he was a man, for all of that, you could depend upon. He would do
what you paid him for and keep his lip buttoned tight once the deed was done.
James had wanted a puudly, for it was a most engaging beast with certain little tricks that, once
understood, might open up new avenues of speculation and approach, might write new chapters in the
tortuous study of alien minds and manners.
But for all of that, it had been a terrifying thing to do and now that the beast was loose, the terror was
compounded.
For it was not wholly beyond speculation that the descendants of this one brood that the escaped
puudly would spawn might wipe out the population of the Earth, or at the best, make the Earth untenable
for its rightful dwellers.
A place like the Earth, with its teeming millions, would provide a field day for the fangs of the
puudlies, and the minds that drove the fangs. They would not hunt for hunger, nor for the sheer madness
of the kill, but because of the compelling conviction that no puudly would be safe until Earth was wiped
clean of life. They would be killing for survival, as a cornered rat would kill... except that they would be
cornered nowhere but in the murderous insecurity of their minds.
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