Galactic Chest
Clifford D. Simak
I had just finished writing the daily Community Chest story, and each day I wrote that story I was sore about it; there were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of copy. Even the copy boys could have written it and no one would have known the difference; no one ever read it – except maybe some of the drive chairmen, and I’m not even sure about them reading it.
I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the Community Chest for another year. I had protested loud. I had said: “Now, you know, Barnacle, I been writing that thing for three or four years. I write it with my eyes shut. You ought to get some new blood into it. Give one of the cubs a chance; they can breathe some life into it. Me, I’m all written out on it.”
But it didn’t do a bit of good. The Barnacle had me down on the assignment book for the Community Chest, and he never changed a thing once he put it in the book.
I wish I knew the real reason for that name of his. I’ve heard a lot of stories about how it was hung on him, but I don’t think there’s any truth in them. I think he got it simply from the way he can hang on to a bar.
I had just finished writing the Community Chest story and was sitting there, killing time and hating myself, when along came Jo Ann. Jo Ann was the sob sister on the paper; she got some lousy yarns to write, and that’s a somber fact I guess it was because I am of a sympathetic nature, and took pity on her, and let her cry upon my shoulder that we got to know each other so well. By now, of course, we figure we’re in love; off and on we talk about getting married, as soon as I snag that foreign correspondent job I’ve been angling for.
“Hi, kid,” I said.
And she says, “Do you know, Mark, what the Barnacle has me down for today?”
“He’s finally ferreted out a one-armed paperhanger,” I guessed, “and he wants you to do a feature…”
“Its worse than that,” she moans. “It’s an old lady who is celebrating her one hundredth birthday.”
“Maybe,” I said, “she will give you a piece of her birthday cake.”
“I don’t see how even you can joke about a thing like this,” Jo Ann told me. “It’s positively ghastly.”
Just then the Barnacle let out a bellow for me, so I picked up the Community Chest story and went over to the city desk.
Barnacle Bill is up to his elbows in copy; the phone is ringing and he’s ignoring it, and for this early in the morning he has worked himself into more than a customary lather. “You remember old Mrs. Clayborne?”
“Sure, she’s dead. I wrote the obit on her ten days or so ago.”
“Well, I want you to go over to the house and snoop around a bit.”
“What for?” I asked. “She hasn’t come back, has she?”
“No, but there’s some funny business over there. I got a tip that someone might have hurried her a little.”
“This time,” I told him, “you’ve outdone yourself. You’ve been watching too many television thrillers.”
“I got it on good authority,” he said and turned back to his work.
So I went and got my hat and told myself it was no skin off my nose how I spent the day; I’d get paid just the same!
But I was getting a little fed up with some of the wild-goose chases to which the Barnacle was assigning not only me, but the rest of the staff as well. Sometimes they paid off; usually, they didn’t. And when they didn’t, Barnacle had the nasty habit of making it appear that the man he had sent out, not he himself, had dreamed up the chase. His “good authority” probably was no more than some casual chatter of someone next to him at the latest bar he’d honored with his cash.
Old Mrs. Clayborne had been one of the last of the faded gentility which at one time had graced Douglas Avenue. The family had petered out, and she was the last of them; she had died in a big and lonely house with only a few servants, and a nurse in attendance on her, and no kin close enough to wait out her final hours in person.
It was unlikely, I told myself, that anyone could have profited by giving her an overdose of drugs, or otherwise hurrying her death. And even if it was true, there’d be little chance that it could be proved; and that was the kind of story you didn’t run unless you had it down in black and white.
I went to the house on Douglas Avenue. It was a quiet and lovely place, standing in its fenced-in yard among the autumn-colored trees.
There was an old gardener raking leaves, and he didn’t notice me when I went up the walk. He was an old man, pottering away and more than likely mumbling to himself, and I found out later that he was a little deaf.
I went up the steps, rang the bell and stood waiting, feeling cold at heart and wondering what I’d say once I got inside. I couldn’t say what I had in mind; somehow or other I’d have to go about it by devious indirection.
A maid came to the door.
“Good morning, ma’am,” I said, “I am from the _Tribune_. May I come in and talk?”
She didn’t even answer; she looked at me for a moment and then slammed the door. I told myself I might have known that was the way it would be.
I turned around, went down the steps, and cut across the grounds to where the gardener was working. He didn’t notice me until I was almost upon him; when he did see me, his face sort of lit up. He dropped the rake, and sat down on the wheelbarrow. I suppose I was as good an excuse as any for him to take a breather.
“Hello,” I said to him, “Nice day,” he said to me. “Indeed it is.”
“You’ll have to speak up louder,” he told me; “I can’t hear a thing you say.”
“Too bad about Mrs. Clayborne,” I told him.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “You live around here? I don’t recall your face.”
I nodded; it wasn’t much of a lie, just twenty miles or so.
“She was a nice old lady. Worked for her almost fifty years. It’s a blessing she is gone.”
“I suppose it is.”
“She was dying hard,” he said.
He sat nodding in the autumn sun and you could almost hear his mind go traveling back across those fifty years. I am certain that, momentarily, he’d forgotten I was there.
“Nurse tells a funny story,” he said finally, speaking to himself more than he spoke to me. “It might be just imagining; nurse was tired, you know.”
“I heard about it,” I encouraged him.
“Nurse left her just a minute and she swears there was something in the room when she came back again. Says it went out the window, just as she came in. Too dark to see it good, she says. I told her she was imagining. Funny things happen, though; things we don’t know about.”
“That was her room,” I said, pointing at the house. “I remember, years ago…”
He chuckled at having caught me in the wrong. “You’re mistaken, sonny. It was the corner one; that one over there.”
He rose from the barrow slowly and took up the rake again.
“It was good to talk with you,” I said. “These are pretty flowers you have. Mind if I walk around and have a look at them?”
“Might as well. Frost will get them in a week or so.”
So I walked around the grounds, hating myself for what I had to do, and looking at the flowers, working my way closer to the corner of the house he had pointed out to me.
There was a bed of petunias underneath the window and they were sorry-looking things. I squatted down and pretended I was admiring them, although all the time I was looking for some evidence that someone might have jumped out the window.
I didn’t expect to find it, but I did.
There, in a little piece of soft earth where the petunias had petered out, was a footprint-well, not a footprint, either, maybe, but anyhow a print. It looked something like a duck track-except that the duck that made it would have had to be as big as a good-sized dog.
I squatted on the walk, staring at it and I could feel spiders on my spine. Finally I got up and walked away, forcing myself to saunter when my body screamed to run.