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

can’t spend the night in a car,” protested Kent. “I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here.”
    “Sure,” urged Charley, “we can’t let you go. Sleeping in a car is no picnic.”
    “We’re harmless,” Kent assured her.
    She flushed. “I wasn’t thinking of that,” she said. “But you said two persons was the capacity of the igloo.”
    “It is,” Kent agreed, “but we can manage. We’ll cut down the heater current a little and step up the condensers. It may get a little chilly, but we can manage with air.”
    He turned to Charley. “How about a pot of coffee,” he suggested.
    Charley grinned, waggled his chin whiskers like a frolicsome billy goat. “I was just thinkin’ about that myself,” he said.
    Ann set down the coffee cup and looked at them. “You see,” she explained, “it’s not just something I want to do myself. Not just some foolish whim of mine. It’s something I’ve got to do. Something that may help someone else—someone who is very dear to me. I won’t be able to sleep or eat or live, if I fail at least to try. You have to understand that I simply must go to Mad-Man’s Canal and try to find Harry, the Hermit.”
    “But there ain’t no Harry, the Hermit,” protested Charley. He wiped the coffee off his beard and sighed. “Goodness knows, I wished there was, since you’re so set on findin’ him.”
    “But even if there isn’t,” said Ann, “I’d at least have to go and look. I couldn’t go through life wondering if you might have been mistaken. Wondering if I should have given up so easily. If I go and try to find him and fail—why, then I’ve done everything I can, everything I could have expected myself to do. But if I don’t I’ll always wonder … there’ll always be that doubt to torment me.”
    She looked from one face to the other.
    “You surely understand,” she pleaded.
    Charley regarded her steadily, his blue eyes shining. “This thing kind of means a lot to you, don’t it?” he said.
    She nodded.
    Kent’s voice broke the spell. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. “You flew down from Landing City to Red Rock in a nice comfortable rocket ship, and now because you covered the hundred miles between here and Red Rock in a canal car, you think you’re an old-timer.”
    He stared back at her hurt eyes.
    “Well, you aren’t,” he declared.
    “Now, lad,” said Charley, “you needn’t get so rough.”
    “Rough!” said Kent. “I’m not getting rough. I’m just telling her a few of the things she has to know. She came across the desert in the car and everything went swell. Now she thinks it’s just as easy to travel the canals.”
    “No, I don’t,” she flared at him, but he went on mercilessly.
    “The canal country is dangerous. There’s all sorts of chances for crack-ups. There are all sorts of dangers. Every discomfort you can imagine. Crack your car against a boulder—and you peel off the quartz. Then the ozone gets in its work. It eats through the metal. Put a crack in your suit and the same thing happens. This atmosphere is poisonous to metal. So full of ozone that if you breathe much of it it starts to work on your lung tissues. Not so much danger of that up on the plateaus, where the air is thinner, but down here where there’s more air, there’s more ozone and it works just that much faster.”
    She tried to stop him, but he waved her into silence and went on:
    “There are the Eaters. Hundreds of them. All with an insane appetite for human bones. They love the phosphate. Every one of them figuring how to get through a car or a spacesuit and at the food inside. You’ve never seen more than a couple of Eaters together at a time. But Charley and I have seen them by the thousands—great herds of them on their periodic migrations up and down the canyons. They’ve kept us penned in our igloo for days while they milled around outside, trying to reach us. And the Hounds, too, although they aren’t so dangerous.