Free New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) by Clifford D. Simak

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    “Ma’am,” said Charley, “you sure must be jokin’. You don’t really mean you want to go into Mad-Man’s?”
    She faced him with a level stare. “But I do,” she declared. “I never was more serious in my life. There’s someone there I have to see.”
    “Lady,” protested the old trapper, “someone’s been spoofin’ you. There ain’t nobody over in Mad-Man’s. You couldn’t find a canal-man in his right mind who’d go near the place.”
    “There is,” she told him. “And probably you’ll laugh at this, too, but I happen to know it to be the truth. The man I want to see is Harry, the Hermit.”
    Kent guffawed, softly, little more than a chuckle under his breath. But she heard and came up out of the chair.
    “You’re laughing,” she said and the words were an accusation.
    “Sit down,” said Kent, “and let me tell you something. Something that no canal-man could admit, but something that every one of them know is the truth.”
    Slowly she sat down in the chair. Kent sat easily on the edge of the table.
    “There isn’t any such a person as Harry, the Hermit,” he said. “It’s just a myth. Just one of those stories that have grown up among the canal-men. Wild tales that they think up when they sit alone in the desolation of the Martian wilderness. Just figments of imagination they concoct to pass away the time. And then, when they go out with their furs, they tell these stories over the drinks at the trading posts and those they tell them to, tell them to the others—and so the tale is started. It goes from mouth to mouth. It gains strength as it goes, and each man improves upon it just a little, until in a year or two it is a full-blown legend. Something that the canal-men almost believe themselves, but know all the time is just a wild canal-tale.”
    “But I know,” protested Ann. “I know there is such a man. I have to see him. I know he lives in Mad-Man’s Canal.”
    “Listen,” snapped Kent and the quiet casualness was gone from his words. “Harry, the Hermit, is everywhere. Go a few hundred miles from here and men will tell you he lives here in Skeleton Canal. Or he is down in the Big Eater system or he’s up north in the Icy Hills. He is just an imaginary person, I tell you. Like the Paul Bunyan of the old lumberjacks back on Earth. Like Pecos Pete of the old American southwest. Like the fairies of the old Irish stories. Some trapper thought him up one lonely night and another trapper improved on him and a fellow dealing a stud poker hand in some little town improved a little more until today he is almost a real personage. Maybe he is real—real as a symbol of a certain group of men—but for all practical purposes, he is just a story, a fabrication of imagination.”
    The girl, he saw, was angry. She reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a flat case. Her hands trembled as she opened it and took out a cigarette. She closed the case and tapped the cigarette against her thumbnail. A pencil of metal, pulled from the case, flared into flame.
    She thrust the white cylinder between her lips and Kent reached down and took it away.
    “Not here,” he said and smiled.
    She flared at him. “Why not?” she asked.
    “Atmosphere,” he said. “Neither Charley nor I smoke. Can’t afford to. The condensers are small. We don’t have too much current to run them. Two persons is the capacity of this igloo. Everything has to be figured down to scratch in this business. We need all the air we get, without fouling it with tobacco smoke.” He handed her the cigarette.
    In silence she put it back in the case, returned the case to her pocket. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
    “Sorry I had to stop you,” Kent told her.
    She rose. “Perhaps I had better go,” she said.
    Charley’s jaw went slack. “Go where?” he asked.
    “My canal car,” she said. “I left it about a mile from here. Went past your place before I saw the light.”
    “But you