Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories
Clifford D. Simak
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Dusty Zebra
And Other Stories
The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Eleven
Introduction by David W. Wixon
Contents
Introduction
Dusty Zebra
Hobbies
Guns on Guadalcanal
Courtesy
The Voice in the Void0
Retrograde Evolution
Way for the Hangtown Rebel!
Final Gentleman
Project Mastodon
Introduction
Clifford D. Simak: Opinions of a Reticent Author
“Destiny, the way you made your life, the way you shaped your living…the way it was meant to be, that way that it would be if you listened to the still, small voice that talked to you at the many turning points and crossroads.”
—Clifford D. Simak, in Time and Again
Clifford D. Simak fell in love with science fiction when he was very young—and when the field itself was very young. Science fiction magazines were a new thing, and they were desperate for material. It did not take a great deal of ability to become a science fiction writer in those days, Cliff would later say—there just was very little competition. That would change quickly, of course, as the new writers learned their craft by doing.
That early science fiction, Cliff would one day tell interviewer Darrell Schweitzer, “was something new, and it was wonderful. It was not well written, but we didn’t know it at the time. I realized years later that it was badly written.
But becoming better at his craft was important to Cliff Simak, and he would become known as a true craftsman. As such, he would occasionally comment on his past work (not often; for him a work, once finished, was a done thing, not to be tampered with or second-guessed).
“Madness from Mars” (1938) and “Sunspot Purge” (1940), for instance, were two stories he would later regret in public. In later years he would say that they were “truly horrible examples of an author’s fumbling agony in the process of finding himself. … It is possible the discerning reader may discover in them some of the seeds of later writing, but I cringe at their being read.” (Note: This editor and reader found something good in both.)
What other stories was Cliff particularly proud of? Or not? (Check the guide at the very end of this article to find out which collection contains each story.)
Cliff would later tell a bibliographer that he “was elated with” “Auk House” and “The Marathon Photograph,” but he did not really explain his reasons for that feeling. Having worked out a story he initially called the “stamp story,” Cliff would later note in a journal that it (“Leg. Forst.”) turned out to be “a better story than I thought it was.”
He confided in his journal that a story called “Realtor” (which would become “Carbon Copy”) “writes smoothly and easily.” A story that first appeared in Cliff’s journal as “Rats in the Walls” turned out to be “The Big Front Yard,” which he would describe as “perhaps the best example of” a first-contact story “as I have done.”
On the other hand, Cliff would describe “Good Night, Mr. James” as “so vicious that it is the only one of my stories adapted to television” (I read that as a pretty vicious comment about television, too.) “It is so unlike anything I have ever written,” he continued, “that at times I find myself wondering how I came to do it.”
But “The Sitters,” Cliff later said, was “the most tender story I have ever written.” It had, he said, “that quality of compassion and human need that I have often attempted but never made come off so well.” He also felt that he did a very good job with “The Thing in the Stone”; “The Ghost of a Model T,” which he felt was closer to the spirit of the early 1920s “than all the books that have been devoted to it”; and “The Autumn Land.” (The latter story he described as “one of the few stories I wrote on order”—Cliff was to be Guest of Honor at the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention, and the people at the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had asked him for a story they could publish in conjunction with that appearance. Cliff would later write, “No writer, of course, is ever completely satisfied with what he writes. He sees failures in it and often wishes he might have done it somewhat differently. But this, in my case, is less true of ‘Autumn Land’ than of any other title I’ve written.”)
Cliff Simak considered his first novel, The Cosmic Engineers, to be a failure. He had never, at that point, written at novel length, but John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of Astounding Stories, asked him to do a story that could be serialized, and Cliff obliged.
Cliff would later tell Sam Moskowitz that he had hoped to blend some of the “grassroots” feel of ordinary people (a technique he had begun with “Rule 18” a couple of years earlier) into the book, but found that “sometimes you had to be grandiose in spite of yourself.” (I will note that while this makes it sound as if the perceived failure was partially a matter of technique, it was really the case that Cliff did not meet his own expectations—he was still learning how to be the writer he wanted to be.)
Some years later a new novel presented Cliff with a bit of a quandary: Galaxy had purchased Destiny Doll with the intention of publishing it as a serial in its new magazine, Worlds of Fantasy, which was to be edited by Lester del Rey. But del Rey soon realized that the new magazine was not going to survive in the marketplace long enough to allow publication of all of Destiny Doll, and so he asked Cliff to condense it to fit into a single issue.
“So I sat for a long time,” Cliff would later say, “thinking whether or not I should cut that much or give him back the money he had paid for it. I needed the money so I cut it in half and ruined it absolutely.” (Cliff would find it ironic that the cut version, which appeared in what was indeed the last issue of the magazine under the title “Reality Doll,” would go on to be nominated for a Nebula Award.)
The novel Out of Their Minds, Cliff would later say, “probably has the best critical potential of anything I’ve written,” that he “got such a kick out of writing Goblin Reservation,” and that Mastodonia was “plain fun to write.”
But A Choice of Gods presented an entirely different situation. “At the time I wrote it,” he would later say, “I wrote with hunched shoulders: I knew there was no plot line; the tale didn’t have a hero; it didn’t have a villain; and there was no action. … But it did have something to say. My agent was appalled.”
But then the publisher gave Cliff “the biggest advance they had ever given me on a story.”
Finally, I’d like to tell you the story Cliff told me, one day when I tried to explain to him how much his novel Way Station had meant to me when I read it as a teen.
At the time, he explained to me, the drivers at his newspaper had gone out on strike, and his guild had decided to honor the picket line. It was going to be a long strike, Cliff knew, and he only had a thousand dollars in the bank (money went a lot farther in the early 1960s, of course, but he had a family to support.)
He had been about to go out looking for a job, he told me, when he abruptly realized, late one night, that he already had a job: he had a novel already started, with about 40 pages written.
So the next morning he began a regimen of sitting down to write at 8 am, taking off an hour at noon, and then working the rest of the day.
He hated it. Writing, for Cliff Simak, did not work that way. But he was nothing if not disciplined.
He finished the book, sent it to his agent, and received, a bit later and while the strike was still going on, a check for $2500. And he won a Hugo Award for the book.
David W. Wixon
The stories mentioned in this introduction can be found in the following collections:
“Madness from Mars” can be found in Volume One, I Am Crying All Inside and Other Stories.
“The Big Front Yard” can be found in Volume Two, The Big Front Yard and Other Stories.
“Leg. Forst.,” “The Autumn Land,” and “The Ghost of a Model T” can be found in Volume Three, The Ghost of a Model T and Other Stories.
“Sunspot Purge” can be found in Volume Six, New Folks’ Home and Other Stories.
“The Sitters” can be found in Volume Seven, A Death in the House and Other Stories.
“Auk House” and “Good Night, Mr. James” can be found in Volume Eight, Good Night, Mr. James and Other Stories.
“Carbon Copy” can be found in Volume Nine, Earth for Inspiration and Other Stories.
“The Thing in the Stone” can be found in Volume Twelve, The Thing in the Stone and Other Stories.
“The Marathon Photograph” can be found in Volume Thirteen, Buckets of Diamonds and Other Stories.
“Rule 18” can be found in Volume Fourteen, Smoke Killer and Other Stories.
Dusty Zebra
For all the mentions over the years of critical commentary of Clifford D. Simak’s many writings in so-called “pastoral” settings, those stories are perhaps made all the more effective—in whatever vision they might seek to portray—when compared to those the author put into more usual urban and suburban settings. This story, which was purchased by Horace Gold, less than three weeks after Cliff mailed it in, for $320, was originally published in the September 1954 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. It’s about the most basic of human economic activities.
“Good business sense,” as Joe Adams saw it; but his wife said, “What have you been up to?”
—dww
If you’re human, you can’t keep a thing around the house. You’re always losing things and never finding them and you go charging through the place, yelling, cross-examining, blaming.
That’s the way it is in all families.
Just one warning—don’t try to figure out where all those things have gone or who might have taken them. If you have any notion of investigating, forget it. You’ll be happier!
I’ll tell you how it was with me.
I’d bought the sheet of stamps on my way home from the office so I could mail out the checks for the monthly bills. But I’d just sat down to write the checks when Marge and Lewis Shaw dropped over. I don’t care much for Lewis and he barely tolerates me. But Marge and Helen are good friends, and they got to talking, and the Shaws stayed all evening.
Lewis told me about the work he was doing at his research laboratory out at the edge of town. I tried to switch him off to something else, but he kept right on. I suppose he’s so interested in his work that he figures everyone else must be. But I don’t know a thing about electronics and I can’t tell a microgauge from a microscope.
It was a fairly dismal evening and the worst of it was that I couldn’t say so. Helen would have jumped all over me for being anti-social.
So, the next evening after dinner, I went into the den to write the checks and, of course, the stamps were gone.
I had left the sheet on top of the desk and now the desk was bare except for one of the Bildo-Blocks that young Bill had outgrown several years before, but which still turn up every now and then in the most unlikely places.
I looked around the room. Just in case they might have blown off the desk, I got down on my hands and knees and searched under everything. There was no sign of the stamps.
I went into the living room, where Helen was curled up in a chair, watching television.
“I haven’t seen them, Joe,” she said. “They must be where you left them.”
It was exactly the kind of answer I should have expected.
“Bill might know,” I said.
“He’s scarcely been in the house all day. When he does show up, you’ve got to speak to him.”
“What’s the matter now?”
“It’s this trading business. He traded off that new belt we got him for a pair of spurs.”
“I can’t see anything wrong in that. When I was a kid…”
“It’s not just the belt,” she said. “He’s traded everything. And the worst of it is that he always seems to get the best of it.”
“The kid’s smart.”
“If you take that attitude, Joe …”
“It’s not my attitude,” I said. “It’s the attitude of the whole business world. When Bill grows up…”
“When he grows up, he’ll be in prison. Why, the way he trades, you’d swear he was training to be a con man!”
“All right, I’ll talk to him.”
I went back into the den because the atmosphere wasn’t exactly as friendly as it might have been and, anyhow, I had to send out those checks, stamps or no stamps.
I got the pile of bills and the checkbook and the fountain pen out of the drawer. I reached out and picked up the Bildo-Block to put it to one side, so I’d have a good, clear space to work on. But the moment I picked it up, I knew that this thing was no Bildo-Block.
It was the right size and weight and was black and felt like plastic, except that it was slicker than any plastic I had ever felt. It felt as if it had oil on it, only it didn’t.
I set it down in front of me and pulled the desk lamp closer. But there wasn’t much to see. It still looked like one of the Bildo-Blocks.
Turning it around, I tried to make out what it was. On the second turn, I saw the faint oblong depression along one side of it—a very shallow depression, almost like a scratch.
I looked at it a little closer and could see that the depression was machined and that within it was a faint red line. I could have sworn the red line flickered just a little. I held it there, studying it, and could detect no further flicker. Either the red had faded or I had been seeing things to start with, for after a few seconds I couldn’t be sure there was any line at all.
I figured it must have been something Bill had picked up or traded for. The kid is more than half pack-rat, but there’s nothing wrong with that, nor with the trading, either, for all that Helen says. It’s just the first signs of good business sense.
I put the block over to one side of the desk and went on with the checks. The next day, during lunch hour, I bought some more stamps so I could mail them. And off and on, all day, I wondered what could have happened to that sheet of stamps.
I didn’t think at all about the block that had the oily feel. Possibly I would have forgotten it entirely, except that when I got home, the fountain pen was missing.
I went into the den to get the pen and there the pen was, lying on top of the desk where I’d left it the night before. Not that I remembered leaving it there. But when I saw it there, I remembered having forgotten to put it back into the drawer.
I picked it up. It wasn’t any pen. It felt like a cylinder of cork, but much too heavy to be any kind of cork. Except that it was heavier and smaller, it felt something—somehow—like a fly rod.
Thinking of how a fly rod felt, I gave my hand a twitch, the way you do to cast a line, and suddenly it seemed to be, in fact, a fly rod. It apparently had been telescoped and now it came untelescoped and lengthened out into what might have been a rod. But the funny thing about it was that it went out only about four feet and then disappeared into thin air
.
Instinctively, I brought it up and back to free the tip from wherever it might be. I felt the slack take up against a sudden weight and I knew I had something on the other end of it. Just like a fish feels, only it wasn’t fighting.
Then, as quickly as it happened, it unhappened. I felt the tension snap off and the weight at the other end was gone and the rod had telescoped again and I held in my hand the thing that looked like a fountain pen.
I laid it down carefully on the desk, being very certain to make no more casting motions, and it wasn’t until then that I saw my hand was shaking.
I sat down, goggling at the thing that looked like the missing fountain pen and the other thing that looked like a Bildo-Block.
And it was then, while I was looking at the two of them, that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the little white dot in the center of the desk.
It was on the exact spot where the bogus pen had lain and more than likely, I imagined, the exact spot where I’d found the Bildo-Block the night before. It was about a quarter of an inch in diameter and it looked like ivory.
I put out my thumb and rubbed it vigorously, but the dot would not rub off. I closed my eyes so the dot would have a chance to go away, and then opened them again, real quick, to surprise it if it hadn’t. It still was there.
I bent over the desk to examine it. I could see it was inlaid in the wood, and an excellent job of inlaying, too. I couldn’t find even the faintest line of division between the wood and the dot.
It hadn’t been there before; I was sure of that. If it had been, I would have noticed it. What’s more, Helen would have noticed it, for she’s hell on dirt and forever after things with a dusting cloth. And to cinch the fact that it had not been there before, no one I’ve ever heard of sold desks with single inlaid ivory dots.
And no one sold a thing that looked like a fountain pen but could become a fly rod, the business end of which disappeared and hooked a thing you couldn’t even see—and which, the next time, might bring in whatever it had caught instead of losing it.
