Clifford D. Simak - Destiny doll

VIP免费
2024-12-16 1 0 292.83KB 86 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
Title : Destiny doll
Author : Clifford D. Simak
First published: 1971
Genre : science fiction
Book price : $2.50
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 : June 20, 1999
Prepared by : Anada Sucka
Anticopyright 1999. All rights reversed.
======================================================================
Destiny Doll
Clifford D. Simak
ONE
The place was white and there was something aloof and puritanical and uncaring about the
whiteness, as if the city stood so lofty in its thoughts that the crawling scum of life was as
nothing to it.
And yet, I told myself, the trees towered over all. It had been the trees, I knew, when the ship
started coming down toward the landing field, riding on the homing beam we'd caught far out in
space, that had made me think we'd be landing at a village. Perhaps, I had told myself, a village
not unlike that old white New England village I had seen on Earth, nestled in the valley with the
laughing brook and the flame of autumn maples climbing up the hills. Watching, I had been
thankful, and a bit surprised as well, to find such a place, a quiet and peaceful place, for
surely any creatures that had constructed such a village would be a quiet and peaceful people, not
given to the bizarre concepts and outlandish mores so often found on an alien planet.
But this was not a village. It was about as far from a village as it was possible to get. It had
been the trees towering over the whiteness of it that had spelled village in my mind. But who
would expect to find trees that would soar above a city, a city that rose so tall one must tilt
his head to see its topmost towers?
The city rose into the air like a towering mountain range springing up, without benefit of
foothills, from a level plain. It fenced in the landing field with its massive structure, like an
oval of tall bleachers hemming in a playing field. From space the city had been shining white, but
it no longer shone. It was white, all white, but soft satiny, having something in common with the
subdued gleam of expensive china on a candle-lighted table.
The city was white and the landing field was white and the sky so faint a blue that it seemed
white as well. All white except the trees that topped a city which surged up to mountain height.
My neck was getting tired from tilting my head to stare up at the city and the trees and now, when
I lowered my head and looked across the field, I saw, for the first time, there were other ships
upon the field. A great many other ships, I realized with a start-more ships than one would
normally expect to find on even some of the larger and busier fields of the human galaxy. Ships of
every size and shape and all of them were white. That had been the reason, I told myself, I'd not
spotted them before. The whiteness of them served as a camouflage, blending them in with the
whiteness of the field itself.
All white, I thought. The whole damn planet white. And not merely white, but a special kind of
whiteness-all with that same soft-china glow. The city and the ships and the field itself all were
china-white, as if they had been carved by some industrious sculptor out of one great block of
stone to form a single piece of statuary.
There was no activity. There was nothing stirring. No one was coming out to meet us. The city
stood up dead.
A gust of wind came from somewhere, a single isolated gust, twitching at my jacket. And I saw
there was no dust. There was no dust for the wind to blow, no scraps of paper for it to roll
about. I scuffed at the material which made up the landing surface and my scuffing made no marks.
The material, whatever it might be, was as free of dust as if it had been swept and scrubbed less
than an hour before.
Behind me I heard the scrape of boots on the ladder's rungs. It was Sara Foster coming down the
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (1 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
ladder and she was having trouble with that silly ballistics rifle slung on a strap across one
shoulder. It was swinging with the motion of her climbing and bumping on the ladder, threatening
to get caught between the rungs.
I reached up and helped her down and she swung around as soon as she reached the ground to stare
up at the city. Studying the classic planes of her face and mop of curling red hair, I wondered
again how a woman of such beauty could have escaped all the softness of face that would have
rounded out the beauty. She reached up a hand and brushed back a lock of hair that kept falling in
her eyes. It had been falling in her eyes since the first moment I had met her.
"I feel like an ant," she said. "It just stands there, looking down at us. Don't you feel the
eyes?"
I shook my head. I had felt no eyes.
"Any minute now," she said, "it will lift a foot and squash us."
"Where are the other two?" I asked.
"Tuck is getting the stuff together and George is listening, with that soft, silly look pasted on
his face. He says that he is home."
"For the love of Christ," I said.
"You don't like George," said Sara.
"That's not it at all," I said. "I can ignore the man. It's this whole deal that gets me. It makes
no sort of sense."
"But he got us here," she said.
"That is right," I said, "and I hope he likes it."
For I didn't like it. Something about the bigness and the whiteness and the quietness of it.
Something about no one coming out to greet us or to question us. Something about the directional
beam that had brought us to this landing field, then no one being there. And about the trees as
well. No trees had the right to grow as tall and big as those that rose above the city.
A clatter broke out above us. Friar Tuck had started down the ladder and George Smith, puffing
with his bulk, was backing out the port, with Tuck guiding his waving feet to help him find the
rungs.
"He'll slip and break his neck," I said, not caring too much if he did.
"He hangs on real good," said Sara, "and Tuck will help him down."
Fascinated, I watched them coming down the ladder, the friar guiding the blind man's feet and
helping him to find the rungs when he happened to misjudge them.
A blind man, I told myself-a blind man and a footloose, phony friar, and a female big game hunter
off on a wild goose chase, hunting for a man who might have been no man at all, but just a silly
legend. I must have been out of my mind, I told myself, to take on a job like this.
The two men finally reached the ground and Tuck, taking the blind man's arm, turned him around so
he faced the city.
Sara had been right, I saw, about that silly smile. Smith's face was wreathed in beatitude and a
look like that, planted on his flabby, vacant face, reeked of obscenity.
Sara touched the blind man's arm with gentle fingers.
"You're sure this is the place, George? You couldn't be mistaken?"
The beatitude changed to an ecstasy that was frightening to see. "There is no mistake," he
babbled, his squeaky voice thickened by emotion. "My friend is here. I hear him and he makes me
see. It's almost as if I could reach out and touch him."
He made a fumbling motion with a pudgy hand, as if he were reaching out to touch someone, but
there was nothing there to touch. It all was in his mind.
It was insane on the face of it, insane to think that a blind man who heard voices-no, not voices,
just a single voice- could lead us across thousands of light years, toward and above the galactic
center, into territory through which no man and no human ship had been known to pass, to one
specific planet. There had been, in past history, many people who had heard voices, but until now
not too many people bad paid attention to them.
"There is a city," Sara was saying to the blind man. "A great white city and trees taller than the
city, trees that go up and up for miles. Is that what you see?"
"No," said George, befuddled by what he had been told, "No, that isn't what I see. There isn't any
city and there aren't any trees." He gulped. "I see," he said, "I see..." He groped for what he
saw and finally gave up. He waved his hands and his face was creased with the effort to tell us
what he saw. "I can't tell you what I see," he finally whispered. "I can't find the words for it.
There aren't any words."
"There is something coming," said Friar Tuck, pointing toward the city. "I can't make it out. Just
a shimmer. As if there were something moving."
I looked where the friar was pointing and I caught the shimmer. But that was all it was. There was
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (2 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
nothing one could really see. Out there, at the base of the city wall, something seemed to be
moving, an elusive flow and sparkle.
Sara was looking through her glasses and now she slipped the strap over her shoulder and handed
them to me.
"What do you think, captain?"
I put the glasses to my eyes and moved them slowly until I caught the movement. At first it was no
more than a moving blur, but slowly it grew in size and separated. Horses? I wondered. It didn't
make much sense that there'd be horses here, but that was what they looked like. White horses
running toward us-if there were horses, of course they would be white! But very funny horses and,
it seemed, with very funny feet, not running the way a normal horse would run, but with a crazy
gait, rocking as they ran.
As they came closer I could make out further detail. They were horses, all right. Formalized
horses-pert upright ears, flaring nostrils, arched necks, manes that rose as if the wind were
blowing through them, but manes that never moved. Like wild running horses some crummy artist
would draw for a calendar, but keeping the set pose the artist had given them, never changing it.
And their feet? Not feet, I saw. Not any feet at all, but rockers. Two pair of rockers, front and
rear, with the front ones narrower so there'd be no interference as the horses ran-reaching
forward with the rear pair and, as they touched the ground, rocking forward on them, with the
front pair lifted and reaching out to touch the ground and rock in turn.
Shaken, I lowered the glasses and handed them to Sara.
"This," I said, "is one you won't believe."
She put the glasses up and I watched the horses coming on. There were eight of them and they all
were white and one was so like the other there was no telling them apart.
Sara took down the glasses.
"Merry-go-round," she said.
"Merry-go-round?"
"Sure. Those mechanical contraptions they have at fairs and carnivals and amusement parks."
I shook my head, bewildered. "I never went to an amusement park," I told her. "Not that kind of
amusement park. But when I was a kid I had a hobbyhorse."
The eight came rushing in, sliding to a halt. Once they halted, they stood rocking gently back and
forth.
The foremost of them spoke to us, employing that universal space argot that man had found already
in existence when he'd gone into space more than twenty centuries before, a language composed of
terms and phrases and words from a hundred different tongues, forged into a bastard lingo by which
many diverse creatures could converse with one another.
"We be hobbies," said the horse. "My name is Dobbin and we have come to take you in."
No part of him moved. He simply stood there, rocking gently, with his ears still perked, his
carven nostrils flaring, with the nonexistent breeze blowing at his mane. I got the impression,
somehow, that the words he spoke came out of his ears.
"I think they're cute," Sara cried, delighted. And that was typical; she would think that they
were cute.
Dobbin paid her no attention. "We urge upon you haste," he said. "There is a mount for each of you
and four to take the luggage. We have but a small amount of time."
I didn't like the way that it was going; I didn't like a thing about it. I'm afraid I snapped at
him.
"We don't like being hurried," I told him. "If you have no time, we can spend the night on the
ship and come in tomorrow morning."
"No! No!" the hobby protested frantically. "That is impossible. There exists great danger with the
setting of the sun. You must be undercover by the time the sun is set."
"Why don't we do the way he says," suggested Tuck, pulling his robe tight around himself. "I don't
like it out here. If there is no time now, we could come back and pick up the luggage later."
Said Dobbin, "We'll take the luggage now. There'll be no time in the morning."
"It seems to me," I said to Dobbin, "you're greatly pressed for time. If that's the case, why
don't you simply turn around and go back where you came from. We can take care of ourselves."
"Captain Ross," said Sara Foster, firmly, "I'm not going to walk all that way if there's a chance
to ride. I think you're being foolish."
"That may well be," I said, angrily, "but I don't like snotty robots ordering me around."
"We be hobbies," Dobbin said. "We not be any robots."
"You be human hobbies?"
"I do not know your meaning."
"Human beings made you. Creatures very much like us."
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (3 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
"I do not know," said Dobbin.
"The hell you don't," I said. I turned to Smith. "George," I said.
The blind man turned his puffy face toward me. The look of ecstasy still was pasted on it.
"What is it, captain?"
"In your talk back and forth with this friend of yours, did you ever mention hobbies?"
"Hobbies? Oh, you mean stamp collecting and..."
"No, I don't," I said. "I mean hobbyhorses. Did you ever mention hobbyhorses?"
"Until this moment," said the blind man, "I never heard of them."
"But you had toys when you were 'a child."
The blind man sighed. "Not the kind you are thinking of. I was born blind. I have never seen. The
kind of toys other children had were not..."
"Captain," Sara said, angrily, "you are ridiculous. Why all this suspicion?"
"I'll tell you that," I said, just as angrily, "and it's an easy answer..."
"I know," she said. "I know. Suspicion, time and time again, has saved that neck of yours."
"Gracious lady," Dobbin said, "please believe there is great danger once the sun has set. I plead
with you, I implore you, I urge you to come with us and most speedily at that."
"Tuck," said Sara, "get up that ladder and start getting down the stuff!" She swung belligerently
toward me. "Have you objections, captain?"
"Miss Foster," I told her, "it's your ship and it's your money. You're paying for the show."
"You're laughing at me," she stormed. "You've laughed all the way. You never really believed in
anything I told you. You don't believe at all-not in anything."
"I got you here," I told her, grimly, "and I'll get you back. That's the deal we made. All I ask
is that you try not to make the job any harder than it has to be."
And immediately that I said it, I was sorry that I had. We were on an alien planet and very far
from home and we should stick together and not start off with bickering. More than likely, I
admitted to myself, she had been quite right; I might have been ridiculous. But right away, I
amended that. Ridiculous on the surface, maybe, but not in principle. When you hit an alien
planet, you are on your own and you have to keep your senses and your hunches sharp. I'd been on a
lot of alien planets and had always managed and so, of course, had Sara, but she'd always hit them
with a good-sized expeditionary force and I'd been on my own.
Tuck, at the first word from her, had gone swarming up the ladder, with his robe tucked up
underneath his belt so he wouldn't trip, and now was handing down the duffle bags and the other
plunder to Sara, who was halfway up the ladder, taking the stuff from him and dropping it as
gently as she could at the ladder's base. There was one thing you had to say about the gal-she
never shirked the work. She was al. ways in there, doing 'her fair share and perhaps a good deal
more.
"All right," I said to Dobbin, "run your packhorses over here. How do you handle this?"
"I regret," said Dobbin, "that we haven't any arms. But with the situation as it is, you'll be
forced to do the packing. Just heap the luggage on top the hobbies' backs and when the load is
completed, metal cinches will extrude from the belly and strap the load securely."
"Ingenious," I said.
Dobbin made a little forward dip upon his rockers, in the semblance of hewing. "Always," he said,
"we attempt to serve."
Four of the horses came rocking up and I began loading them. When Tuck got through with handing
down the gear, Sara came and helped me. Tuck closed the port and by the time he had climbed down
the ladder, we were all set to go.
The sun was touching the city skyline and hunks were being nibbled out of it by the topmost
towers. It was slightly more yellow than the sun of Earth-perhaps a K-type star. The ship would
know, of course; the ship would have it all. The ship did all the work that a man was supposed to
do. It gobbled up the data and pulled it all apart and put it back together. It knew about this
planet and about the planet's star, it knew about the atmosphere and the chemistry and all the
rest of it and it would have been more than willing to give it out to anyone who asked. But I
hadn't asked. I had meant to go back and get the data sheet, but I hadn't counted on getting a
reverse bum's rush by a pack of hobbyhorses. Although, I told myself, it probably made, no
difference, I could come back in the morning. But I couldn't bring myself to like the fact that
I'd not latched onto that data sheet.
"Dobbin," I asked, "what is all this danger business? What are we supposed to be afraid of?"
"I cannot inform you," Dobbin said, "since I, myself, fail to understand, but I can assure you..."
"0K, let it go," I told him.
Tuck was puffing and panting, trying to boost Smith onto one of the hobbies, Sara already was on
one of them, sitting straight and prim, the perfect picture of a gal on the threshold of a very
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (4 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
great adventure, and that, of course, was all it was to her-another great adventure. Sitting
there, proud, astride her mount, with that ridiculous ancient rifle slung across her shoulder,
nattily attired in an adventure-going costume.
I glanced quickly about the bowl that was the landing field, rimmed in by the city, and there was
nothing stirring. Shadows ran out from the city's western wall as the sun went inching down behind
the buildings and some of those western buildings had turned from white to black, but there were
no lights.
Where was everyone? Where were the city's residents and all those visitors who'd come down on the
spaceships standing like ghostly tombstones on the field? And why were the ships all white?
"Honored sir," Dobbin said to me, "if you please, would you get into my saddle. Our time is
running short."
A chill was in the air and I don't mind admitting that I felt a twinge of fright. I don't know
why. Perhaps just the place itself, perhaps the feeling of being trapped on the landing field
rimmed in by the city, perhaps the fact that there seemed no living thing in sight except the
hobbies-if you could call them living and I suppose you could.
I reached up and lifted the strap of my laser gun off my shoulder and, grasping it in hand, swung
into Dobbin's saddle.
"You need no weapon here," Dobbin said, disapprovingly. I didn't answer him. It was my own damn
business.
Dobbin wheeled and we started out across the field, heading toward the city. It was a crazy kind
of ride-smooth enough, no jerking, but going up and down as much, it seemed, as one was moving
forward. It wasn't rocking; it was like skating on a sine wave.
The city seemed not to grow much larger, nor to gain in detail. We bad been much farther from it,
I realized, than it bad appeared; the landing field was larger, too, than it had appeared. Behind
me, Tuck let out a yell.
"Captain!"
I twisted in the saddle.
"The ship!" yelled Tuck. "The ship! They're doing something to it."
And they were, indeed-whoever they might be.
A long-necked mechanism stood beside the ship. It looked like a bug with a squat and massive body
and a long and slender neck with a tiny head atop it. From the mouth of it sprayed out a mist
directed at the ship. Where it struck the ship, the ship was turning white, just like those other
tombstone ships that stood upon the, field.
I let out an angry yelp, reaching for a rein and yanking hard. But I might as well have yanked
upon a rock. Dobbin kept straight on.
"Turn around," I yelled. "Go back!"
"There is no turning back, most honored sir," said Dobbin, conversationally, not even panting with
his running. "There is no time. We must reach the safety of the city."
"There is time, by God," I yelled, jerking up the gun and aiming it at the ground in front of us,
between Dobbin's ears.
"Shut your eyes," I yelled to the others, and pulled the trigger one notch back. Even through my
eyelids, I sensed the flaring of the laser-light as it bounced back from the ground. Under me
Dobbin reared and spun, almost swapping end for end, and when I opened my eyes we were heading
back toward the ship.
"You'll be the death of us, crazy being," Dobbin moaned. "All of us will die."
I looked behind me and the hobbies all were following. Dobbin, it appeared, was leader and where
he went they were content to follow. But farther back there was no sign of where the laser bolt
had struck. Even at first notch capacity it should have made a mark; there should have been a
smoking crater back there where it struck.
Sara was riding with one arm up across her eyes.
"You all right?" I asked.
"You crazy fool!" she cried.
"I yelled for you to close your eyes," I said. "There was bound to be reflection."
"You yelled, then fired," she said. "You didn't give us time."
She took her arm down and her eyes blinked at me and, hell, she was all right. Just something else
to bitch about; she never missed a chance.
Ahead of us the bug that had been spraying the ship was scurrying off across the field. It must
have had wheels or treads underneath it, for it was spinning along at a headlong clip, its long
neck stretched out in front of it in its eagerness to get away from there.
"Please, sir," Dobbin pleaded, "we are simply wasting time. There is nothing that can be done."
"One more word out of you," I said, "and this time right between the ears."
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (5 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
We reached the ship and Dobbin skidded to a halt, but I didn't wait for him to stop. I hit the
ground and was running toward the ship while he still was moving. Although what I intended to do I
had no idea.
I reached the ship and I could see that it was covered with some stuff that looked like frosty
glass and when I say covered, I mean covered-every inch of it. There was no metal showing. It
looked unfunctional, like a model ship. Reduced in size, it could have passed for those little
model ships sold in decorator shops to stick up on the mantle.
I put out my hand and touched it and it was slick and hard. There was no look of metal and there
was no feel of metal, either. I rapped it with my gun stock and it rang like a bell, setting up a
resonance that went bouncing across the field and came back as an echo from the city walls.
"What is it, captain?" Sara asked, her voice somewhat shaky. This was her ship, and there was no
one who could mess around with it.
"A coating of something hard," I said. "As if it had been sealed."
"You mean we can't get into it?"
"I don't know. Maybe if we had a sledge hammer to crack it, we could peel it off."
She made a sudden motion and the rifle was off her back and the butt against her shoulder. I'll
say this for her: crazy as that gun might be, she could handle it.
The sound of the shot was loud and flat and the hobbies reared in terror. But above the sound of
the report itself was another sound, a wicked howling that almost screamed, the noise of a
ricocheting bullet tumbling end for end, and pitched lower than the shrill howling of the slug was
the booming resonance of the milk-white ship. But there was no indication of where the bullet
might have struck. The whiteness of the ship still was smooth-uncracked, unblemished, unmarked.
Two thousand foot-pounds of metal had slammed against it and had not made a dent.
I lifted the laser gun and Dobbin said to me, "There be no use, you foolish folk. There is nothing
you can do."
I whirled on him angrily. "I thought I told you...' I yelled. "One more word out of you and right
between the eyes."
"Violence," Dobbin told me, perkily, "will get you nowhere. But staying here, once the sun has
set, spells very rapid death."
"But the ship!" I shouted.
"The ship is sealed," said Dobbin, "like all the others. Better sealed with you outside of it than
with you still inside."
And although I would not have admitted it, I knew that he was right in saying there was nothing we
could do. For I recalled that the field had been unmarked by the laser beam and undoubtedly all
this whiteness was the same-the field, the ships, the city, all coated, more than likely, with
some substance so tightly bonded in its atomic structure that it was indestructible.
"I sorrow greatly for you," said Dobbin, with no sorrow in his voice. "I know the shock of you.
But once on this planet, no one ever leaves. Although there is no need of also dying, I plead with
you compassionately to get into the saddle and let us head for safety."
I looked up at Sara and she nodded quietly. She had figured it, I knew, about the way I had,
although in my case most unwillingly. There was no use in staying out here. The ship was sealed,
whatever that might mean or for whatever purpose, and when morning came we could come back to see
what we could do. From the moment we had met him, Dobbin had been insistent about the danger.
There might be danger or there might be none-there was no way, certainly, that we could determine
if there were or weren't. The only sensible thing, at the moment, was to go along with him.
I swung swiftly to the saddle and even before I found seat, Dobbin had whirled about, running even
as he led.
"We have lost most valued time," he told me. "We will try with valiance to make it up. We yet may
reach the city."
A good part of the landing field lay in shadow now and only the sky was bright. A faint, smokelike
dusk was filtering through the city.
Once on this planet, Dobbin had said, no one ever leaves. But these were his words alone, and
nothing else. Perhaps there was a real intent to keep us here, which would explain the sealing of
the ship, but there would be ways, I told myself, that could be tried to get off the planet when
the time to go should come. There were always ways.
The city was looming up as we drew closer, and now the buildings began to assume their separate
shapes. Up till now they had been a simple mass that had the appearance of a solid cliff thrusting
up from the flatness of the field. They had seemed tall from out in the center of the field; now
they reared into the sky so far that, this close, it was impossible to follow with the eye up to
their tops.
The city still stayed dead. There were no lights in any of the windows-if, indeed, the buildings
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (6 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
did have windows. There was no sign of movement at the city's base. There were no outlying
buildings; the field ran up to the base of the buildings and the buildings then jutted straight
into the sky.
The hobbies thundered cityward, their rockers pounding out a ringing clangor as they humped along
like a herd of horses galloping wildly before a scudding storm front. Once you got the hang of
riding them, it wasn't bad at all. You just went sort of loose and let your body follow that
undulating sine wave.
The city walls loomed directly in front of us, great slabs of masonry that went up and up, and now
I saw that there were streets, or at least what I took for streets, narrow slits of empty
blackness that looked like fractures in a monstrous cliff.
The hobbies plunged into one of the slits of emptiness and darkness closed upon us. There was no
light here; except when the sun stood straight overhead, there never would be light. The walls
seemed to rise all about us, the slit that was a street narrowing down to a vanishing point so
that the walls seemed on every hand.
Ahead of us one building stood a little farther back, widening the street, and from the level of
the street a wide ramp ran up to massive doors. The hobbies turned and flung themselves at the
ramp and went humping up it and through one of the gaping doors.
We burst into a room where there was a little light and the light, I saw, came from great
rectangular blocks set into the wall that faced us.
The hobbies rocked swiftly toward one of the blocks and came to a halt before it. To one side I
saw a gnome, or what appeared to be a gnome, a small, humpbacked, faintly humanoid creature that
spun a dial set into the wall beside the slab of glowing stone.
"Captain, look!" cried Sara.
There was no need for her to cry out to me-and I had seen it almost as soon as she had. Upon the
glowing stone appeared a scene-a faint and shadowed scene, as if it might be a place at the bottom
of a clear and crystal sea, its colors subdued by the depth of water, its outlines shifting with
the little wind ripples that ran on the water's surface.
A raw and bleeding landscape, with red lands stretching to a mauve, storm-torn horizon, broken by
crimson buttes, and in the foreground a clump of savage yellow flowers. But even as I tried to
grasp all this, to relate it to the kind of world it might have been, it changed, and in its place
was a jungle world, drowned in the green and purple of overwhelming vegetation, spotted by the
flecks of screaming color that I knew were tropic flowers, and back of it all a sense of lurking
bestiality that made my hide crawl even as I looked at it.
Then it, too, was gone-a glimpse and it was gone-and in its place was a yellow desert lighted by
a moon and by a flare of stars that turned the sky to silver, with the lips of the marching sand
dunes catching and fracturing the moon and starlight so that the dunes appeared to be foaming
waves of water charging in upon the land.
The desert did not fade as the other places had. It came in a rush upon us and exploded in my
face.
Beneath me I felt the violent plunging of a bucking Dobbin and made a frantic grab at the cantle
of the saddle which seemed to have no cantle and then felt myself pitched forward and turning in
the air.
I struck on one shoulder and skidded in the sand and finally came to rest, the breath knocked out
of me. I struggled up, cursing-or trying to curse and failing, because I had no breath to curse
with-and once on my feet, saw that we were alone in that land we had seen upon the glowing block.
Sara sprawled to one side of me and not far off Tuck was struggling to his feet, hampered by the
cassock that had become entangled about his legs, and a little beyond Tuck, George was crawling on
his hands and knees, whimpering like a pup that had been booted out of doors into a friendless.
frigid night.
All about us lay the desert, desiccated, without a shred of vegetation, flooded by the great white
moon and the thousand glowing stars, all shining like lamps in a cloudless sky.
"He's gone!" George was whimpering as he crawled about. "I can't hear him anymore. I have lost my
friend."
And that was not all that was lost. The city was lost and the planet on which the city stood. We
were in another place. This was one trip, I told myself, that I never should have made. I had
known it all along. I'd not believed in it, even from the start. And to make a go of it, you had
to believe in everything you did. You had to have a reason for everything you did.
Although, I recalled, I had really no choice.
I had been committed from the moment I had seen that beauty of a spaceship standing on the field
of Earth.
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (7 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
TWO
I had come sneaking back to Earth. Not back really, for I never had been there to start with. But
Earth was where my money was and Earth was sanctuary and out in space I was fair game to anyone
who found me. Not that what I had done had been actually so bad, nor was I to blame entirely, but
there were a lot of people who had lost their shirts on it and, they were out to get me and
eventually would get me if I failed to reach Earth's sanctuary.
The ship that I was driving was a poor excuse-a fugitive from a junkyard (and that was exactly
what it was), patched up and stuck together with binder twine and bailing wire, but I didn't need
it long. All I wanted of it was to get me to Earth. Once I stepped out of it, it could fall into a
heap for all it mattered to me. Once I got to Earth, I'd be staying there.
I knew that Earth Patrol would be on watch for me-not that Earth cared; so far as Earth was
concerned, the more the merrier. Rather a patrol to keep undesirable characters like myself from
fleeing back to Earth.
So I came into the solar system with the Sun between myself and Earth and I hoped that my slide
rule hadn't slipped a notch and that I had it figured right. I piled on all the normal-space speed
I could nurse out of the heap and the Sun's gravity helped considerably and when I passed the Sun
that ship was traveling like a hell-singed bat. There was an anxious hour when it seemed I might
have sliced it just a bit too close. But the radiation screens held and I lost only half my speed
and there was Earth ahead.
With all engines turned off and every circuit cut, I coasted on past Venus, no more than five
million miles off to my left, and headed in for Earth.
The patrol didn't spot me and it was sheer luck, of course, but there wasn't much to spot. I had
no energy output and all the electronics were doused and all they could have picked up was a mass
of metal and fairly small, at that. And I came in, too, with the Sun behind me, and the solar
radiations, no matter how good the equipment you may have, help louse up reception.
It was insane to try it, of course, and there were a dozen very nasty ways in which I could have
failed, but on many a planet-hunting venture I had taken chances that were no less insane. The
thing was that I made it.
There is just one spaceport on Earth. They don't need any more. The traffic isn't heavy. There are
few people left on Earth; they all are out in space. The ones who are left are the hopeless
sentimentalists who think there is status attached to living on the planet where the human race
arose. They, and the ones like myself, are the only residents. The sentimentalists, I had heard,
were a fairly snooty crowd of self-styled aristocrats, but that didn't bother me. I wasn't
planning on having too much to do with them. Occasionally excursion ships dropped in with a load
of pilgrims, back to visit the cradle of the race, and a few freighters bringing in assorted
cargo, but that was all there was.
I brought in the ship and set it down and walked away from it, carrying my two bags, the only
possessions I had been able to get away with before the vultures had come flocking in. The ship
didn't fall into a heap; it just stood there, its slab-sided self, the sorriest-looking vessel you
ever clapped your eyes on.
Just two berths away from it stood this beauty of a ship. It gleamed with smart efficiency, slim
and sleek, a space yacht that seemed straining toward the sky, impatient at its leash.
There was no way of knowing, of course, just by looking at it, what it had inside, but there is
something about a ship that one simply cannot miss. Just looking at this one, there was no doubt
that no money had been spared to make it the best that could be built. Standing there and looking
at it, I found my hands itching to get hold of it.
I suppose they itched the worse because I knew I'd never go into space again. I was all washed up.
I'd spend the rest of my life on Earth the best way that I could. If I ever left it, I'd be
gobbled up.
I walked off the field and went through customs-if you could call it customs. They just went
through the motions. They had nothing against me or anyone; they weren't sore at me, or anyone.
That, it seemed to me, was the nicest thing one could say of Earth.
I went to an inn nearby and once I'd settled in, went down to the bar.
I was on my third or fourth when a robot flunky came into the bar and zeroed in on me.
"You are Captain Ross?"
I wondered, with a flare of panic, just what trouble I was in for. There wasn't a soul on Earth
who knew me or knew that I was coming. The only contacts I had made had been with the customs
people and the room clerk at the inn.
"I have a note for you," said the robot, handing it to me. The envelope was sealed and it had no
marks upon it.
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (8 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
I opened it and took out the card. It read:
Captain Michael Ross,
Hilton Inn
If Captain Ross will be my dinner guest tonight, I would be much obliged. My car will be waiting
at the entrance of the inn at eight o'clock. And, captain, may I be among the first to welcome you
to Earth.
Sara Foster
I sat there staring at it and the bottle robot came sliding down the bar. He picked up the empty
glass. "Another one?" be asked.
"Another one," I said.
Just who was Sara Foster, and how had she known, an hour after my arrival, that I was on Earth?
I could ask around, of course, but there seemed no one to ask, and for some reason I could not
figure out why I felt disinclined to do so.
It could be a trap. There were people, I well knew, who hated me enough to have a try at smuggling
me off the Earth. They would know by now, of course, that I had obtained a ship, but few who would
believe that such a ship would carry me to Earth. And there could be none of them who could even
guess I'd already reached the Earth.
I sat there, drinking, trying to get it straight in mind, and I finally decided I would take a
chance.
Sara Foster lived in a huge house set atop a hill, surrounded by acres of wilderness that in turn
surrounded more acres of landscaped lawns and walks, and in the center of all of this sat the huge
house, built of sun-warmed bricks, with a wide portico that ran the length of the house, and with
many chimneys thrusting from its roof.
I had expected to be met at the door by a robot, but Sara Foster was there, herself, to greet me.
She was wearing a green dinner dress that swept the floor and served to set off, in violent
contrast, the flame of her tumbled hair, with the one errant lock forever hanging in her eyes.
"Captain Ross," she said, giving me her hand, "how nice of you to come. And on such short notice,
too. I'm afraid it was impetuous of me, but I did so want to see you."
The hall in which we stood was high and cool, paneled with white-painted wood and the floor of
wood so polished that it shone, with a massive chandelier of crystal hanging from the ceiling. The
place breached wealth and a certain spirit of Earth-rooted gentility and it all was very pleasant.
"The others are in the library," she said. "Let us go and join them."
She linked her arm through mine and led me down the hail until we came to a door that led into a
room that was a far cry from the hall which I had entered. It might have been a library-there were
some shelves with books-but it looked more like a trophy room. Mounted heads hung from every wall,
a glass-enclosed gun rack ran across one end, and the floor was covered with fur rugs, some with
the heads attached, the bared fangs forever snarling.
Two men were sitting in chairs next to the mammoth fireplace and as we entered one of them got up.
He was tall and cadaverous, his face long and lean and dark, not so much darkened, I thought as I
looked at him, by the outdoors and the sun as by the thoughts within his skull. He wore a dark
brown cassock loosely belted at the waist by a string of beads, and his feet, I saw, were encased
in sturdy sandals.
"Captain Ross," said Sara Foster, "May I present Friar Tuck."
He held out a bony hand. "My legal name," he said "is Hubert Jackson, but I prefer Friar Tuck. In
the course of my wanderings, captain, I have heard many things of you."
I looked hard at him. "You have done much wandering?" For I had seen his like before and had liked
none of what I saw.
He bent his bony head. "Far enough," be said, "and always in the search of truth?'
"Truth," I said, "at times is very hard to come by." "And captain," Sara said, quickly, "this is
George Smith." The second man by this time had fumbled to his feet and was holding out a flabby
hand in my direction. He was a tubby little man with a grubby look about him and his eyes were a
milky white.
"As you can see by now," said Smith, "I am quite blind. You'll excuse me for not rising when you
first came in the room."
It was embarrassing. There was no occasion for the man to so thrust his blindness on us.
I shook his hand and it was as flabby as it looked, as nearly limp as a living hand can be.
Immediately he fumbled his way back into the chair again.
"Perhaps this chair," Sara said to me. "There'll be drinks immediately. I know what the others
want, but..."
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (9 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt
"If you have some Scotch," I said.
I sat down in the chair she had indicated and she took another and there were the four of us,
huddled in a group before that looming fireplace and surrounded by the heads of creatures from a
dozen different planets.
She saw me looking at them. "I forgot," she said. "You'll excuse me, please. You had never heard
of me-until you got my note, I mean."
"I am sorry, madam."
"I'm a ballistics hunter," she said, with more pride, it seemed to me, than such a statement
called for.
She could not have missed the fact that I did not understand. "I use only a ballistics rifle," she
explained. "One that uses a bullet propelled by an explosive charge. It is," she said, "the only
sporting way to hunt. It requires a considerable amount of skill in weapon handling and
occasionally some nerve. It you miss a vital spot the thing that you are hunting has a chance at
you."
"I see," I said. "A sporting proposition. Except that you have the first crack at it."
"That is not always true," she said.
A robot brought the drinks and we settled down as comfortably as we could, fortified behind our
glasses.
"I have a feeling, captain," Sara said, "that you do not approve."
"I have no opinion at all," I told her. "I have no information on which opinion could be based."
"But you have killed wild creatures."
"A few," I said, "but there was no such thing involved as sporting instinct. For food,
occasionally. At times to save my life."
I took a good long drink. "I took no chance," I told her. "I used a laser gun. I just kept burning
them as long as it seemed necessary."
"Then you're no sportsman, captain."
"No," I said, "I am-let us say I was-a planet hunter. It seems I'm now retired."
And I wondered, sitting there, what it was all about. She hadn't invited me, I was sure, just for
my company. I didn't fit in this room, nor in this house, any better than the other two who sat
there with me. Whatever was going on, they were a part of it and the idea of being lumped with
them in any enterprise left me absolutely cold.
She must have read my mind. "I imagine you are wondering, captain, what is going on."
"Ma'am," I said, "the thought had crossed my mind."
"Have you ever heard of Lawrence Arlen Knight?" "The Wanderer," I said. "Yes, I've heard of him.
Stories told about him. That was long ago. Well before my time."
"Those stories?"
"The usual sort of stories. Space yarns. There were and are a lot of others like him. He just
happened to snare the imagination of the story tellers. That name of his, perhaps. It has a ring
to it. Like Johnny Appleseed or Sir Launcelot."
"But you heard..."
"That he was hunting something? Sure. They all are hunting something."
"But he disappeared."
"Stay out there long enough," I told her, "and keep on poking into strange areas and you're bound
to disappear. Sooner or later you'll run into something that will finish you."
"But you..."
"I quit soon enough," I said. "But I was fairly safe, at that. All I was hunting were new planets.
No Seven Cities of Cibola, no mystic El Dorado, no trance-bound Crusade of the Soul."
"You mock at us," said Friar Tuck. "I do not like a mocker."
"I did not mean to mock," I said to Sara Foster. "Space is full of tales. The one you mention is
only one of many. They provide good entertainment when there's nothing else to do. And I might add
that I dislike correction at the hands of a phony religico with dirty fingernails."
I put my glass down upon the table that stood beside the chair and got up on my feet.
"Thanks for the drink," I said. "Perhaps some other time..."
"Just a moment, please," she said. "If you will please sit down. I apologize for Tuck. But it's I
you're dealing with, not him. I have a proposal that you may find attractive."
"I've retired," I said.
"Perhaps you saw the, ship standing on the field. Two berths from where you landed.
"Yes, I saw the ship. And admired it. Does it belong to you?"
She nodded. "Captain, I need someone to run that ship. How would you like the job?"
"But why me," I asked. "Surely there are other men."
She shook her head. "On Earth? How many qualified spacemen do you think there are on Earth?"
file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll.txt (10 of 86) [2/3/03 12:32:19 AM]
摘要：

file:///F|/rah/Clifford%20D.Simak/Clifford%20Simak%20-%20Destiny%20Doll. xtTitle:DestinydollAuthor:CliffordD.SimakFirstpublished:1971Genre:sciencefictionBookprice:$2.50Comments:tomyknowledge,thisistheonlyavailablee-textofthisbookSource:scannedandOCR-readfromapaperbackeditionwithXeroxTextBridgePro...

展开>> 收起<<
Clifford D. Simak - Destiny doll.pdf

共86页,预览18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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：86 页 大小：292.83KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-16

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 86
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注