Title : The Autumn Land

Author : Clifford D. Simak

Original copyright year: 1971

He sat on the porch in the rocking chair, with the loose board creaking as he rocked. Across the street
the old white-haired lady cut a bouquet of chrysanthemums in the never-ending autumn. Where he could
see between the ancient houses to the distant woods and wastelands, a soft Indian-summer blue lay upon
the land. The entire village was soft and quiet, as old things often are - a place constructed for a dreaming
mind rather than a living being. It was an hour too early for his other old and shaky neighbor to come
fumbling down the grass-grown sidewalk, tapping the bricks with his seeking cane. And he would not
hear the distant children at their play until dusk had fallen - if he heard them then. He did not always hear
them.

There were books to read, but he did not want to read them. He could go into the backyard and spade
and rake the garden once again, reducing the soil to a finer texture to receive the seed when it could be
planted - if it ever could be planted - but there was slight incentive in the further preparation of a seed
bed against a spring that never came. Earlier, much earlier, before he knew about the autumn and the
spring, he had mentioned garden seeds to the Milkman, who had been very much embarrassed.

He had walked the magic miles and left the world behind in bitterness and when he first had come here
had been content to live in utter idleness, to be supremely idle and to feel no guilt or shame at doing
absolutely nothing or as close to absolutely nothing as a man was able. He had come walking down the
autumn street in the quietness and the golden sunshine, and the first person that he saw was the old lady
who lived across the street. She had been waiting at the gate of her picket fence as if she had known he
would be coming, and she had said to him, 'You're a new one come to live with us. There are not many
come these days. That is your house across the street from me, and I know we'll be good neighbors.' He
had reached up his hand to doff his hat to her, forgetting that he had no hat. 'My name is Nelson Rand,'
he'd told her. 'I am an engineer. I will try to be a decent neighbor.' He had the impression that she stood
taller and straighter than she did, but old and bent as she might be there was a comforting graciousness
about her. 'You will please come in,' she said. 'I have lemonade and cookies. There are other people
there, but I shall not introduce them to you.' He waited for her to explain why she would not introduce
him, but there was no explanation, and he followed her down the time-mellowed walk of bricks with
great beds of asters and chrysanthemums, a mass of color on either side of it.

In the large, high-ceilinged living room, with its bay windows forming window seats, filled with massive
furniture from another time and with a small blaze burning in the fireplace, she had shown him to a seat
before a small table to one side of the fire and had sat down opposite him and poured the lemonade and
passed the plate of cookies.

'You must pay no attention to them,' she had told him. 'They are all dying to meet you, but I shall not
humor them.'

It was easy to pay no attention to them, for there was no one there.

'The Major, standing over there by the fireplace,' said his hostess, 'with his elbow on the mantel, a most
ungainly pose if you should ask me, is not happy with my lemonade. He would prefer a stronger drink.
Please, Mr. Rand, will you not taste my lemonade? I assure you it is good. I made it myself. I have no
maid, you see, and no one in the kitchen. I live quite by myself and satisfactorily, although my friends
keep dropping in, sometimes more often than I like.'
He tasted the lemonade, not without misgivings, and to his surprise it was lemonade and was really good,
like the lemonade he had drunk when a boy at Fourth of July celebrations and at grade school picnics,
and had never tasted since.

'It is excellent,' he said.

'The lady in blue,' his hostess said, 'sitting in the chair by the window, lived here many years ago. She and
I were friends, although she moved away some time ago and I am surprised that she comes back, which
she often does. The infuriating thing is that I cannot remember her name, if I ever knew it. You don't
know it, do you?'

'I am afraid I don't.'

'Oh, of course, you wouldn't. I had forgotten. I forget so easily these days. You are a new arrival.'

He had sat through the afternoon and drank her lemonade and eaten her cookies, while she chattered on
about her nonexistent guests. It was only when he had crossed the street to the house she had pointed
out as his, with her standing on the stoop and waving her farewell, that he realized she had not told him
her name. He did not know it even now.

How long had it been? He wondered, and realized he didn't know. It was this autumn business. How
could a man keep track of time when it was always autumn?

It all had started on that day when he'd been driving across Iowa, heading for Chicago. No, he reminded
himself, it had started with the thinnesses, although he had paid little attention to the thinnesses to begin
with. Just been aware of them, perhaps as a strange condition of the mind, or perhaps an unusual quality
to the atmosphere and light. As if the world lacked a certain solidity that one had come to expect, as if
one were running along a mystic borderline between here and somewhere else.

He had lost his West Coast job when a government contract had failed to materialize. His company had
not been the only one; there were many other companies that were losing contracts and there were a lot
of engineers who walked the streets bewildered. There was a bare possibility of a job in Chicago,
although he was well aware that by now it might be filled. Even if there were no job, he reminded himself,
he was in better shape than a lot of other men. He was young and single, he had a few dollars in the
bank, he had no house mortgage, no car payments, no kids to put through school. He had only himself to
support - no family of any sort at all. The old, hard-fisted bachelor uncle who had taken him to raise
when his parents had died in a car crash and had worked him hard on that stony hilly Wisconsin farm,
had receded deep into the past becoming a dim, far figure that was hard to recognize. He had not liked
his uncle, Rand remembered - had not hated him, simply had not liked him. He had shed no tears, he
recalled, when the old man had been caught out in a pasture by a bull and gored to death. So now Rand
was quite alone, not even holding the memories of a family.

He had been hoarding the little money that he had, for with a limited work record, with other men better
qualified looking for the jobs, he realized that it might be some time before he could connect with
anything. The beat-up wagon that he drove had space for sleeping, and he stopped at the little wayside
parks along the way to cook his meals.

He had almost crossed the state, and the road had started its long winding through the bluffs that rimmed
the Mississippi. Ahead he caught a glimpse, at several turnings of the road, of smokestacks and tall
structures that marked the city just ahead.
He emerged from the bluffs, and the city before him, a small industrial center that lay on either side the
river. It was then that he felt and saw (if one could call it seeing) the thinness that he had seen before or
had sensed before. There was about it, not exactly an alienness, but a sense of unreality, as if one were
seeing the actuality of the scene through some sort of veil, with the edges softened and the angles
flattened out, as if one might be looking at it as one would look at the bottom of a clear-water lake with a
breeze gently ruffling the surface. When he had seen it before, he had attributed it to road fatigue and had
opened the window to get a breath of air or had stopped the car and gotten out to walk up and down the
road awhile, and it had gone away.

But this time it was worse than ever, and he was somewhat frightened at it - not so much frightened at it
as he was frightened of himself, wondering what might be wrong with him.

He pulled off to the side of the road, braking the car to a halt, and it seemed to him, even as he did it, that
the shoulder of the road was rougher than he'd thought. As he pulled off the road, the thinness seemed to
lessen, and he saw that the road had changed, which explained its roughness. The surface was pocked
with chuckholes and blocks of concrete had been heaved up and other blocks were broken into pebbly
shards.

He raised his eyes from the road to look at the city, and there was no city, only the broken stumps of a
place that had somehow been destroyed. He sat with his hands frozen on the wheel, and in the silence -
the deadly, unaccustomed silence - he heard the cawing of crows. Foolishly, he tried to remember the
last time he had heard the caw of crows, and then he saw them, black specks that flapped just above the
bluff top. There was something else as well - the trees. No longer trees, but only here and there
blackened stumps. The stumps of a city and the stumps of trees, with the black, ash-like flecks of crows
flapping over them.

Scarcely knowing what he did, he stumbled from the car. Thinking of it later, it had seemed a foolish thing
to do, for the car was the only thing he knew, the one last link he had to reality. As he stumbled from it,
he put his hand down in the seat, and beneath his hand he felt the solid, oblong object. His fingers closed
upon it, and it was not until he was standing by the car that he realized what he held - the camera that had
been lying in the seat beside him.

Sitting on the porch, with the loose floor board creaking underneath the rocker, he remembered that he
still had the pictures, although it had been a long time since he had thought of them - a long time, actually,
since he'd thought of anything at all beyond his life, day to day, in this autumn land. It was as though he
had been trying to keep himself from thinking, attempting to keep his mind in neutral, to shut out what he
knew - or, more precisely perhaps, what he thought he knew.

He did not consciously take the pictures, although afterward he had tried to tell himself he did (but never
quite convincing himself that this was entirely true), complimenting himself in a wry sort of way for
providing a piece of evidence that his memory alone never could have provided. For a man can think so
many things, daydream so many things, imagine so many things that he can never trust his mind.

The entire incident, when he later thought of it, was hazy, as if the reality of that blasted city lay in some
strange dimension of experience that could not be explained, or even rationalized. He could remember
only vaguely the camera at his eyes and the clicking as the shutter snapped. He did recall the band of
people charging down the hill toward him and his mad scramble for the car, locking the door behind him
and putting the car in gear, intent on steering a zigzag course along the broken pavement to get away
from the screaming humans who were less than a hundred feet away.
But as he pulled off the shoulder, the pavement was no longer broken. It ran smooth and level toward the
city that was no longer blasted. He pulled off the road again and sat limply, beaten, and it was only after
many minutes that he could proceed again, going very slowly because he did not trust himself, shaken as
he was, to drive at greater speed.

He had planned to cross the river and continue to Chicago, getting there that night, but now his plans
were changed. He was too shaken up and, besides, there were the films. And he needed time to think, he
told himself, a lot of time to think.

He found a roadside park a few miles outside the city and pulled into it, parking alongside an outdoor grill
and an old-fashioned pump. He got some wood from the small supply he carried in the back and built a
fire. He hauled out the box with his cooking gear and food, fixed the coffee pot, set a pan upon the grill
and cracked three eggs into it.

When he had pulled off the road, he had seen the man walking along the roadside; and now, as he
cracked the eggs, he saw that the man had turned into the park and was walking toward the car. The
man came up to the pump.

'Does this thing work?' he asked.

Rand nodded. 'I got water for the pot,' he said. 'Just now.'

'It's a hot day,' said the man.

He worked the pump handle up and down.

'Hot for walking,' he said.

'You been walking far?'

'The last six weeks,' he said.

Rand had a closer look at him. The clothes were old and worn, but fairly clean. He had shaved a day or
two before. His hair was long - not that he wore it long, but from lack of barbering.

Water gushed from the spout and the man cupped his hands under it, bent to drink.

'That was good,' be finally said. 'I was thirsty.'

'How are you doing for food?' asked Rand, The man hesitated. 'Not too well,' he said.

'Reach into that box on the tailgate. Find yourself a plate and some eating implements. A cup, too. Coffee
will be ready soon.'

'Mister, I wouldn't want you to think I was walking up here...'

'Forget it,' said Rand. 'I know how it is. There's enough for the both of us.'

The man got a plate and cup, a knife, a fork, a spoon. He came over and stood beside the fire.

'I am new at this.' he said. 'I've never had to do a thing like this before. I always had a job. For seventeen
years I had a job...'

'Here you are,' said Rand. He slid the eggs onto the plate, went back to the box to get three more.

The man walked over to a picnic table and put down his plate. 'Don't wait for me,' said Rand. 'Eat them
while they're hot. The coffee's almost ready. There's bread if you want any.'

'I'll get a slice later,' said the man, 'for mopping up.'

John Sterling, he said his name was, and where now would John Sterling be, Rand wondered - still
tramping the highways, looking for work, any kind of work, a day of work, an hour of work, a man who
for seventeen years had held a job and had a job no longer? Thinking of Sterling, he felt a pang of guilt.
He owed John Sterling a debt he never could repay, not knowing at the time they talked there was any
debt involved.

They had sat and talked, eating their eggs, mopping up the plates with bread, drinking hot coffee.

'For seventeen years,' said Sterling. 'A machine operator. An experienced hand. With the same
company. Then they let me out. Me and four hundred others. All at one time. Later they let out others. I
was not the only one. There were a lot of us. We weren't laid off, we were let out. No promise of going
back. Not the company's fault, I guess. There was a big contract that fizzled out. There was no work to
do. How about yourself? You let out, too?'

Rand nodded. 'How did you know?'

'Well, eating like this. Cheaper than a restaurant. And you got a sleeping bag. You sleep in the car?'

'That is right,' said Rand. 'It's not as bad for me as it is for some of the others. I have no family.'

'I have a family,' said Sterling. 'Wife, three kids. We talked it over, the wife and me. She didn't want me
to leave, but it made sense I should. Money all gone, unemployment run out. Long as I was around, it
was hard to get relief. But if I deserted her, she could get relief. That way there's food for the wife and
kids, a roof over their heads. Hardest thing I ever did. Hard for all of us. Someday I'll go back. When
times get better, I'll go back. The family will be waiting.'

Out on the highway the cars went whisking past. A squirrel came down out of a tree, advanced
cautiously toward the table, suddenly turned and fled for his very life, swarming up a nearby trunk.

'I don't know,' said Sterling. 'It might be too big for us, this society of ours. It may be out of hand. I read
a lot. Always liked to read. And I think about what I read. It seems to me maybe we've outrun our
brains. The brains we have maybe were OK back in prehistoric days. We did all right with the brains we
had until we built too big and complex. Maybe we built beyond our brains. Maybe our brains no longer
are good enough to handle what we have. We have set loose economic forces we don't understand and
political forces that we do not understand, and if we can't understand them, we can't control them.
Maybe that is why you and I are out of jobs.'

'I wouldn't know,' said Rand. 'I never thought about it.'

'A man thinks a lot,' said Sterling. 'He dreams a lot walking down the road. Nothing else to do. He
dreams some silly things: Things that are silly on the face of them, but are hard to say can't be really true.
Did this ever happen to you?'
'Sometimes,' said Rand.

'One thing I thought about a lot. A terribly silly thought. Maybe thinking it because I do so much walking.
Sometimes people pick me up, but mostly I walk. And I got to wondering if a man should walk far
enough could he leave it all behind? The farther a man might walk, the farther he would be from
everything.'

'Where you heading?' Rand asked.

'Nowhere in particular. Just keep on moving, that is all. Month or so I'll start heading south. Get a good
head start on winter. These northern states are no place to be when winter comes,'

'There are two eggs left,' said Rand. 'How about it?'

'Hell, man, I can't. I already...

'Three eggs aren't a lot. I can get some more.'

'Well, if you're sure that you don't mind. Tell you what - let's split them, one for you, one for me.'

The giddy old lady had finished cutting her bouquet and had gone into the house. From up the street
came the tapping of a cane - Rand's other ancient neighbor, out for his evening walk. The sinking sun
poured a blessing on the land. The leaves were gold and red, brown and yellow - they had been that way
since the day that Rand had come. The grass had a tawny look about it - not dead, just dressed up for
dying.

The old man came trudging carefully down the walk, his cane alert against a stumble, helping himself with
it without really needing any help. He was slow, was all. He halted by the walk that ran up to the porch.
'Good afternoon,' he said. 'Good afternoon.' said Rand. 'You have a nice day for your walk.' The old
man acknowledged the observation graciously and with a touch of modesty, as if he, himself, might
somehow be responsible for the goodness of the day. 'It looks,' he said, 'as if we might have another fine
day tomorrow.' And having said that, he continued down the street.

It was ritual. The same words were said each day. The situation, like the village and the weather, never
varied. He could sit here on this porch a thousand years, Rand told himself, and the old man would
continue going past and each time the selfsame words would be mouthed - a set piece, a strip of film run
over and over again. Something here had happened to time. The year had stuck on autumn.

Rand did not understand it. He did not try to understand it. There was no way for him to try. Sterling had
said that man's cleverness might have outstripped his feeble, prehistoric mind - or, perhaps, his brutal and
prehistoric mind. And here there was less chance of understanding than there had been back in that other
world.

He found himself thinking of that other world in the same myth-haunted way as he thought of this one.
The one now seemed as unreal as the other. Would he ever, Rand wondered, find reality again? Did he
want to find it?

There was a way to find reality, he knew. Go into the house and take out the photos in the drawer of his
bedside table and have a look at them. Refresh his memory, stare reality in the face again. For those
photos, grim as they might be, were a harder reality than this world in which he sat or the world that he
had known. For they were nothing seen by the human eye, interpreted by the human brain.

They were, somehow, fact. The camera saw what it saw and could not lie about it; it did not fantasize, it
did not rationalize, and it had no faulty memory, which was more than could be said of the human mind.

He had gone back to the camera shop where he had left the film and the clerk had picked out the
envelope from the box behind the counter.

'That will be three ninety-five.' he said.

Rand took a five-dollar bill out of his wallet and laid it on the counter.

'If you don't mind my asking,' said the clerk, 'where did you get these pictures?'

'It is trick photography,' said Rand.

The clerk shook his head. 'If that is what they are, they're the best I've ever seen.'

The clerk rang up the sale and, leaving the register open, stepped back and picked up the envelope.

'What do you want?' asked Rand.

The man shook the prints out of the envelope, shuffled through them.

'This one,' he said.

Rand stared at him levelly. 'What about it?' he asked.

'The people. I know some of them. The one in front. That is Bob Gentry. He is my best friend.'

'You must be mistaken,' Rand said coldly.

He took the prints from the clerk's fingers, put them back in the envelope.

The clerk made the change. He still was shaking his head, confused, perhaps a little frightened, when
Rand left the shop.

He drove carefully, but with no loss of time, through the city and across the bridge. When he hit open
country beyond the river, he built up his speed, keeping an eye on the rear-vision mirror. The clerk had
been upset, perhaps enough to phone the police. Others would have seen the pictures and been upset as
well. Although, he told himself, it was silly to think of the police. In taking the photos, he had broken no
regulations, violated no laws. He had had a perfect right to take them.

Across the river and twenty miles down the highway, he turned off into a small, dusty country road and
followed it until he found a place to pull off, where the road widened at the approach to a bridge that
crossed a small stream. There was evidence that the pull-off was much used, fishermen more than likely
parking their cars there while they tried their luck. But now the place was empty.

He was disturbed to find that his hands were shaking when he pulled the envelope from his pocket and
shook out the prints.
And there it was - as he no longer could remember it.

He was surprised that he had taken as many pictures as he had. He could not remember having taken
half that many. But they were there, and as he looked at them, his memory, reinforced, came back again,
although the photos were much sharper than his memory. The world, he recalled, had seemed to be
hazed and indistinct so far as his eyes had been concerned; in the photos it lay cruel and merciless and
clear. The blackened stumps stood up, stark and desolate, and there could be no doubt that the imprint
that lay upon the photos was the actuality of a bombed-out city. The photos of the bluff showed the
barren rock no longer masked by trees, with only here and there the skeletons of trees that by some
accidental miracle had not been utterly reduced by the storm of fire. There was only one photo of the
band of people who had come charging down the hill toward him; and that was understandable, for once
having seen them, he had been in a hurry to get back to the car. Studying the photo, he saw they were
much closer than he'd thought. Apparently they had been there all the time, just a little way off, and he
had not noticed them in his astonishment at what had happened to the city. If they had been quieter about
it, they could have been on top of him and overwhelmed him before he discovered them. He looked
closely at the picture and saw that they had been close enough that some of the faces were fairly well
defined. He wondered which one of them was the man the clerk back at the camera shop had
recognized.

He shuffled the photographs together and slid them back into the envelope and put it in his pocket. He
got out of the car and walked down to the edge of the stream. The stream, he saw, was no more than ten
feet or so across; but here, below the bridge, it had gathered itself into a pool, and the bank had been
trampled bare of vegetation, and there were places where fishermen had sat. Rand sat down in one of
these places and inspected the pool. The current came in close against the bank and probably had
undercut it, and lying there, in the undercut, would be the fish that the now-absent anglers sought,
dangling their worms at the end of a long cane pole and waiting for a bite.

The place was pleasant and cool, shaded by a great oak that grew on the bank just below the bridge.
From some far-off field came the subdued clatter of a mower. The water dimpled as a fish came up to
suck in a floating insect. A good place to stay, thought Rand. A place to sit and rest awhile. He tried to
blank his mind, to wipe out the memory and the photos, to pretend that nothing at all had happened, that
there was nothing he must think about.

But there was, he found, something that he must think about. Not about the photos, but something that
Sterling had said just the day before. 'I got to wondering.' he had said, 'if a man should walk far enough,
could he leave it all behind.'

How desperate must a man get, Rand wondered, before he would be driven to asking such a question.
Perhaps not desperate at all - just worried and alone and tired and not being able to see the end of it.
Either that, or afraid of what lay up ahead. Like knowing, perhaps, that in a few years time (and not too
many years, for in that photo of the people the clerk had seen a man he knew) a warhead would hit a
little Iowa town and wipe it out. Not that there was any reason for it being hit; it was no Los Angeles, no
New York, no Washington, no busy port, no center of transportation or communication, held no great
industrial complex, was no seat of government. Simply hit because it had been there, hit by blunder, by
malfunction, or by miscalculation. Although it probably didn't matter greatly, for by the time it had been
hit, the nation and perhaps the world might have been gone. A few years, Rand told himself, and it would
come to that. After all the labor, all the hopes and dreams, the world would come to just that.

It was the sort of thing that a man might want to walk away from, hoping that in time be might forget it
ever had been there. But to walk away, he thought, rather idly, one would have to find a starting point.
You could not walk away from everything by just starting anywhere.
It was an idle thought, sparked by the memory of his talk with Sterling; and he sat there, idly, on the
stream bank; and because it had a sense of attractive wonder, he held it in his mind, not letting go at once
as one did with idle thoughts. And as he sat there, still holding it in mind, another thought, another time
and place crept in to keep it company; and suddenly he knew, with no doubt at all, without really
thinking, without searching for an answer, that he knew the place where he could start.

He stiffened and sat rigid, momentarily frightened, feeling like a fool trapped by his own unconscious
fantasy. For that, said common sense, was all that it could be. The bitter wondering of a beaten man as
he tramped the endless road looking for a job, the shock of what the photos showed, some strange,
mesmeric quality of this shaded pool that seemed a place apart from a rock-hard world - all of these put
together had produced the fantasy.

Rand hauled himself erect and turned back toward the car, but as he did he could see within his mind this
special starting place. He had been a boy - how old? he wondered, maybe nine or ten - and he had
found the little valley (not quite a glen, yet not quite a valley, either) running below his uncle's farm down
toward the river. He had never been there before and he had never gone again; on his uncle's farm there
had been too many chores, too many things to do to allow the time to go anywhere at all. He tried to
recall the circumstances of his being there and found that he could not. All that he could remember was a
single magic moment, as if he had been looking at a single frame of a movie film - a single frame
impressed upon his memory because of what? Because of some peculiar angle at which the light had
struck the landscape? Because for an instant he had seen with different eyes than he'd ever used before
or since? Because for the fractional part of a second he had sensed a simple truth behind the facade of
the ordinary world? No matter what, he knew, he had seen magic in that moment.

He went back to the car and sat behind the wheel, staring at the bridge and sliding water and the field
beyond, but seeing, instead of them, the map inside his head. When he went back to the highway, he'd
turn left instead of right, back toward the river and the town, and before he reached them he would turn
north on another road and the valley of the magic moment would be only a little more than a hundred
miles away. He sat and saw the map and purpose hardened in his mind. Enough of this silliness, he
thought; there were no magic moments, never had been one; when he reached the highway, he'd turn to
the right and hope the job might still be there when he reached Chicago.

When he reached the highway, he turned not right, but left.

It had been so easy to find, he thought as he sat on the porch. There had been no taking of wrong roads,
no stopping for directions; he'd gone directly there as if he'd always known he would be coming back
and had kept the way in mind. He had parked the car at the hollow's mouth, since there was no road,
and had gone on foot up the little valley. It could so easily have been that he would not have found the
place, he told himself, admitting now for the first time since it all began that he might not have been so
sure as he had thought he was. He might have gone up the full length of the valley and not have found the
magic ground, or he might have passed it by, seeing it with other eyes and not recognizing it.

But it still was there, and he had stopped and looked at it and known it; again he was only nine or ten,
and it was all right, the magic still was there. He had found a path he had not seen before and had
followed it, the magic still remaining; and when he reached the hilltop, the village had been there. He had
walked down the street in the quietness of the golden sunshine, and the first person that he had seen had
been the old lady waiting at the gate of her picket fence, as if she had been told that he would becoming.

After he had left her house be went across the street to the house she said was his. As he came in the
front door, there was someone knocking at the back.
'I am the Milkman,' the knocker had explained. He was a shadowy sort of person: you could see and yet
you did not really see him; when one looked away and then looked back at him, it was as if one were
seeing someone he had never seen before.

'Milkman,' Rand had said. 'Yes, I suppose I could do with milk.'

'Also,' said the Milkman, 'I have eggs, bread, butter, bacon and other things that you will need. Here is a
can of oil; you'll need it for your lamps. The woodshed is well stocked, and when there's need of it, I'll
replenish it. The kindling's to the left as you go through the door.'

Rand recalled that he'd never paid the milkman or even mentioned payment. The Milkman was not the
kind of man to whom one mentioned money. There was no need, either, to leave an order slip in the
milkbox; the Milkman seemed to know what one might need and when without being told. With some
shame, Rand remembered the time he had mentioned garden seeds and caused embarrassment, not only
for the Milkman, but for himself as well. For as soon as he mentioned them, he had sensed that he'd
broken some very subtle code of which he should have been aware.

The day was fading into evening, and he should be going in soon to cook himself a meal. And after that,
what he wondered. There still were books to read, but he did not want to read them. He could take out
from the desk the plan he had laid out for the garden and mull over it a while, but now he knew he'd
never plant the garden. You didn't plant a garden in a forever-autumn land, and there were no seeds.

Across the street a light blossomed in the windows of that great front room with its massive furniture, its
roomy window seats, the great fireplace flaring to the ceiling. The old man with the cane had not
returned, and it was getting late for him. In the distance now Rand could hear the sounds of children
playing in the dusk.

The old and young, he thought. The old, who do not care: the young, who do not think. And what was he
doing here, neither young nor old?

He left the porch and went down the walk. The street was empty, as it always was. He drifted slowly
down it, heading toward the little park at the village edge. He often went there, to sit on a bench beneath
the friendly trees; and it was there, he was sure, that he would find the children. Although why he should
think that he would find them there he did not know, for he had never found them, but only heard their
voices.

He went past the houses, standing sedately in the dusk. Had people ever lived in them, he wondered.
Had there ever been that many people in this nameless village? The old lady across the street spoke of
friends she once had known, of people who had lived here and had gone away. But was this her memory
speaking or the kind befuddlement of someone growing old?

The houses, he had noted, all were in good repair. A loose shingle here and there, a little peeling paint,
but no windows broken, no loosened gutters, sagging from the eaves, no rotting porch posts. As if, he
thought, good householders had been here until very recently.

He reached the park and could see that it was empty. He still heard the childish voices, crying at their
play, but they had receded and now came from somewhere just beyond the park. He crossed the park
and stood at its edge, staring off across the scrub and abandoned fields.

In the east the moon was rising, a full moon that lighted the landscape so that he could see every little
clump of bushes, every grove of trees. And as he stood there, he realized with a sudden start that the
moon was full again, that it was always full, it rose with the setting of the sun and set just before the sun
came up, and it was always a great pumpkin of a moon, an eternal harvest moon shining on an eternal
autumn world.

The realization that this was so all at once seemed shocking. How was it that he had never noticed this
before? Certainly he had been here long enough, had watched the moon often enough to have noticed it.
He had been here long enough - and how long had that been, a few weeks, a few months, a year? He
found he did not know. He tried to figure back and there was no way to figure back. There were no
temporal landmarks. Nothing ever happened to mark one day from the next. Time flowed so smoothly
and so uneventfully that it might as well stand still.

The voices of the playing children had been moving from him, becoming fainter in the distance; and as he
listened to them, he found that he was hearing them in his mind when they were no longer there. They had
come and played and now had ceased their play. They would come again, if not tomorrow night, in
another night or two. It did not matter, he admitted, if they came or not, for they really weren't there.

He turned heavily about and went back through the streets. As he approached his house, a dark figure
moved out from the shadow of the trees and stood waiting for him. It was the old lady from across the
street. It was evident that she had been waiting his return.

'Good evening, ma'am.' he said gravely. 'It is a pleasant night.'

'He is gone,' she said. 'He did not come back. He went just like the others and he won't come back.'

'You mean the old man.'

'Our neighbor,' she said. 'The old man with the cane. I do not know his name. I never knew his name.
And I don't know yours.'

'I told it to you once,' said Rand, but she paid him no attention.

'Just a few doors up the street.' she said, 'and I never knew his name and I doubt that he knew mine. We
are a nameless people here, and it is a terrible thing to be a nameless person.'

'I will look for him,' said Rand. 'He may have lost his way.'

'Yes, go and look for him,' she said. 'By all means look for him. It will ease your mind. It will take away
the guilt. But you will never find him.'

He took the direction that he knew the old man always took. He had the impression that his ancient
neighbor, on his daily walks, went to the town square and the deserted business section, but he did not
know. At no other time had it ever seemed important where he might have gone on his walks.

When he emerged into the square, he saw, immediately, the dark object lying on the pavement and
recognized it as the old man's hat. There was no sign of the old man himself.

Rand walked out into the square and picked up the hat. He gently reshaped and creased it and after that
was done held it carefully by the brim so that it would come to no further damage.

The business section drowsed in the moonlight. The statue of the unknown man stood starkly on its base
in the center of the square. When he first had come here, Rand recalled, he had tried to unravel the
identity of the statue and had failed. There was no legend carved into the granite base, no bronze plate
affixed. The face was undistinguished, the stony costume gave no hint as to identity or period. There was
nothing in the posture or the attitude of the carven body to provide a clue. The statue stood, a forgotten
tribute to some unknown mediocrity.

As he gazed about the square at the business houses. Rand was struck again, as he always was, by the
carefully unmodern make-up of the establishments. A barber shop, a hotel, a livery barn, a bicycle shop,
a harness shop, a grocery store, a meat market, a blacksmith shop - no garage, no service station, no
pizza parlor, no hamburger joint. The houses along the quiet streets told the story; here it was
emphasized. This was an old town, forgotten and by-passed by the sweep of time, a place of another
century. But there was about it all what seemed to be a disturbing sense of unreality, as if it were no old
town at all, but a place deliberately fashioned in such a manner as to represent a segment of the past.

Rand shook his head. What was wrong with him tonight? Most of the time he was quite willing to accept
the village for what it seemed to be, but tonight he was assailed with uneasy doubt.

Across the square he found the old man's cane. If his neighbor had come in this direction, he reasoned,
he must have crossed the square and gone on down the street nearest to the place where he had
dropped the cane. But why had he dropped the cane? First his hat and then his cane. What had
happened here?

Rand glanced around, expecting that he might catch some movement, some furtive lurker on the margin
of the square. There was nothing. If there had been something earlier, there was nothing now.

Following the street toward which his neighbor might have been heading, he walked carefully and alert,
watching the shadows closely. The shadows played tricks on him, conjuring up lumpy objects that could
have been a fallen man, but weren't. A half a dozen times he froze when he thought he detected
something moving, but it was, in each case, only an illusion of the shadows.

When the village ended, the street continued as a path. Rand hesitated, trying to plan his action. The old
man had lost his hat and cane, and the points where he had dropped them argued that he had intended
going down the Street that Rand had followed. If he had come down the Street, he might have continued
down the path, out of the village and away from it, perhaps fleeing from something in the village.

There was no way one could be sure, Rand knew. But he was here and might as well go on for at least a
ways. The old man might be out there somewhere, exhausted, perhaps terribly frightened, perhaps fallen
beside the path and needing help.

Rand forged ahead. The path, rather well-defined at first, became fainter as it wound its way across the
rolling moonlit countryside. A flushed rabbit went bobbing through the grass. Far off an owl chortled
wickedly. A faint chill wind came out of the west. And with the wind came a sense of loneliness, of open
empty space untenanted by anything other than rabbit, owl and wind.

The path came to an end, its faintness finally pinching out to nothing. The groves of trees and thickets of
low-growing shrubs gave way to a level plain of blowing grass, bleached to whiteness by the moon, a
faceless prairie land. Staring out across it, Rand knew that this wilderness of grass would run on and on
forever. It had in it the scent and taste of foreverness. He shuddered at the sight of it and wondered why
a man should shudder at a thing so simple. But even as he wondered, he knew - the grass was staring
back at him; it knew him and waited patiently for him, for in time he would come to it. He would wander
into it and be lost in it, swallowed by its immensity and anonymity.
He turned and ran, unashamedly, chill of blood and brain, shaken to the core. When he reached the
outskirts of the village, he finally stopped the running and turned to look back into the wasteland. He had
left the grass behind, but he sensed illogically that it was stalking him, flowing forward, still out of sight,
but soon to appear, with the wind blowing billows in its whiteness.

He ran again, but not so fast and hard this time, jogging down the street. He came into the square and
crossed it, and when he reached his house, he saw that the house across the street was dark. He did not
hesitate, but went on down the street he'd walked when he first came to the village. For he knew now
that he must leave this magic place with its strange and quiet old village, its forever autumn and eternal
harvest moon, its faceless sea of grass, its children who receded in the distance when one went to look
for them, its old man who walked into oblivion, dropping hat and cane - that he must somehow find his
way back to that other world where few jobs existed and men walked the road to find them, where nasty
little wars flared in forgotten corners and a camera caught on film the doom that was to come.

He left the village behind him and knew that he had not far to go to reach the place where the path
swerved to the right and down a broken slope into the little valley to the magic starting point he'd found
again after many years. He went slowly and carefully so that he would not wander off the path, for as he
remembered it the path was very faint. It took much longer than he had thought to reach the point where
the path swerved to the right into the broken ground, and the realization grew upon him that the path did
not swing to right and there was no broken ground.

In front of him he saw the grass again and there was no path leading into it. He knew that he was
trapped, that he would never leave the village until he left it as the old man had, walking out of it and into
nothingness. He did not move closer to the grass, for he knew there was terror there and he'd had
enough of terror. You're a coward, he told himself.

Retracing the path back to the village, he kept a sharp lookout, going slowly so that he'd not miss the
turnoff if it should be there. It was not, however. It once had been, he told himself, bemused, and he'd
come walking up it, out of that other world he'd fled.

The village street was dappled by the moonlight shining through the rustling leaves. The house across the
street still was dark, and there was an empty loneliness about it. Rand remembered that he had not eaten
since the sandwich he had made that noon. There'd be something in the milkbox - he'd not looked in it
that morning, or had he? He could not remember.

He went around the house to the back porch where the milkbox stood. The Milkman was standing there.
He was more shadowy than ever, less well defined, with the moonlight shining on him, and his face was
deeply shaded by the wide-brimmed hat he wore.

Rand halted abruptly and stood looking at him, astounded that the Milkman should he there. For he was
out of place in the autumn moonlight. He was a creature of the early morning hours and of no other times.

'I came,' the Milkman said, 'to determine if I could be of help.'

Rand said nothing. His head buzzed large and misty, and there was nothing to be said.

'A gun,' the Milkman suggested. 'Perhaps you would like a gun.'

'A gun? Why should I want one?'
'You have had a most disturbing evening. You might feel safer, more secure, with a gun in hand, a gun
strapped about your waist.'

Rand hesitated. Was there mockery in the Milkman's voice?

'Or a cross.'

'A cross?'

'A crucifix. A symbol...'

'No,' said Rand. 'I do not need a cross.'

'A volume of philosophy, perhaps.'

'No!' Rand shouted at him. 'I left all that behind. We tried to use them all, we relied on them and they
weren't good enough and now...'

He stopped, for that had not been what he'd meant to say, if in fact he'd meant to say anything at all. It
was something that he'd never even thought about; it was as if someone inside of him were speaking
through his mouth.

'Or perhaps some currency?'

'You are making fun of me,' Rand said bitterly, 'and you have no right...'

'I merely mention certain things,' the Milkman said, 'upon which humans place reliance...'

'Tell me one thing,' said Rand, 'as simply as you can. Is there any way of going back?'

'Back to where you came from?'

'Yes,' said Rand. 'That is what I mean.'

'There is nothing to go back to.' the Milkman said. 'Anyone who comes has nothing to go back to.'

'But the old man left. He wore a black felt hat and carried a cane. He dropped them and I found them.'

'He did not go back,' the Milkman said. 'He went ahead. And do not ask me where, for I do not know.'

'But you're a part of this.'

'I am a humble servant. I have a job to do and I try to do it well. I care for our guests the best that I am
able. But there comes a time when each of our guests leaves us. I would suspect this is a halfway house
on the road to someplace else.'

'A place for getting ready,' Rand said.

'What do you mean?' the Milkman asked.

'I am not sure,' said Rand. 'I had not meant to say it.' And this was the second time, he thought, that he'd
said something he had not meant to say.

'There's one comfort about this place.' the Milkman said. 'One good thing about it you should keep in
mind. In this village nothing ever happens.'

He came down off the porch and stood upon the walk. 'You spoke of the old man,' he said, 'and it was
not the old man only. The old lady also left us. The two of them stayed on much beyond their time.'

'You mean I'm here all alone?'

The Milkman had started down the walk, but now he stopped and turned. 'There'll be others coming,' he
said. 'There are always others coming.'

What was it Sterling had said about man outrunning his brain capacity? Rand tried to recall the words,
but now, in the confusion of the moment, he had forgotten them. But if that should be the case, if Sterling
had been right (no matter how he had phrased his thought), might not man need, for a while, a place like
this, where nothing ever happened, where the moon was always full and the year was stuck on autumn?

Another thought intruded and Rand swung about, shouting in sudden panic at the Milkman. 'But these
others? Will they talk to me? Can I talk with them? Will I know their names?'

The Milkman had reached the gate by now and it appeared that he had not heard.

The moonlight was paler than it had been. The eastern sky was flushed. Another matchless autumn day
was about to dawn.

Rand went around the house. He climbed the steps that led up to the porch. He sat down in the rocking
chair and began waiting for the others.

The End




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