Parallel Worlds of Clifford D. Simak
*3.8.1904
+25.4.1988
Various excerpts from
Simak's books
"Space is an illusion, and time as well. There is
no such factor as either time or space. We have been blinded by our own
cleverness, blinded by false perceptions of those qualities that we term
eternity and infinity. There is another factor that explains it all, and once
this universal factor is recognized, everything grows simple. There is no
longer any mystery, no longer any wonder, no longer any doubt; for the
simplicity of it all lies before us - "
(Clifford
D. Simak: "A Heritage of Stars")
"We came into a homeless frontier, a place where
we were not welcome, where nothing that lived was welcome, where thought and
logic were abhorrent and we were frightened, but we went into this place
because the universe lay before us, and if we were to know ourselves, we must
know the universe..."
(Clifford D. Simak: "A Heritage of Stars")
"... if mankind were to continue in other
than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based
on some other method than technology."
(Clifford D. Simak: "A Heritage of Stars")
"... Horton (said:).
"Time is still the great mystery to us. It is no more than a concept; we
don't know if it even exists...""
(Clifford Simak: "Shakespeare's
Planet")
"The man (George Sutton) nudged him
in the arm. "One thing more, son. Do you believe in God?"
Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl.
He asked: "You really want an answer?"
"I want an answer," said the man.
"I want an honest one."
"The answer," said Frost, "is
that I don't know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of.
Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being - yes, I would
believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort
of force or power or will throughout the universe. The universe is too orderly
for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the
mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the
operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is
not a supervisory force of some kind, a benevolent ruling force to maintain
that sort of order.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Why
Call Them Back From Heaven?")
"Could
it be possible, Hezekiah asked himself, that there was no room for both the
faith and truth, that they were mutually exclusive qualities that could not
coexist? He shuddered as he thought of it, for if this should be the case, they
had spent their centuries of devotion to but little purpose, pursuing a
will-o'-the-wisp. Must faith be exactly that, the willingness and ability to
believe in the face of a lack of evidence? If one could find the evidence,
would then the faith be dead? If that were the situation, then which one did
they want? Had it been, he wondered, that men had tried what they even now were
trying and had realized that there was no such thing as truth, but only faith,
and being unable to accept the faith without its evidence, had dropped the
faith as well?"
(Clifford Simak: "A Choice
of Gods", Chapter 7)
"(Excerpt from journal of Nov. 29, 5036)...
... In the process I have become a student of
the sky and know all the clouds there are and have firmly fixed in mind the
various hues of blue that the sky can show - the washed-out, almost invisible
blue of a hot, summer noon; the soft robin's egg, sometimes almost greenish
blue of a late springtime evening, the darker, almost violet blue of fall. I have
become a connoisseur of the coloring that the leaves take on in autumn and I
know all the voices and the moods of the woods and river valley. I have, in a
measure, entered into communion with nature, and in this wise have followed in
the footsteps of Red Cloud and his people, although I am sure that their
understanding and their emotions are more fine-tuned than mine are. I have
seen, however, the roll of seasons, the birth and death of leaves, the glitter
of the stars on more nights than I can number and from all this as from nothing
else I have gained a sense of a purpose and an orderliness which it does not
seem to me can have stemmed from accident alone.
It seems to me, thinking of it, that there must
be some universal plan which set in motion the orbiting of the electrons about
the nucleus and the slower, more majestic orbit of the galaxies about one
another to the very edge of space. There is a plan, it seems to me, that
reaches out of the electron to the rim of the universe and what this plan may
be or how it came about is beyond my feeble intellect. But if we are looking
for something on which to pin our faith - and, indeed, our hope - the plan
might well be it. I think we have thought too small and have been too afraid..."
(Clifford Simak: "A Choice
of Gods", Chapter 24)
""Father, at the very start I made it
plain to you that I was not inclined to be a religious sort of man - not in the
accepted sense, that is. And I played square with you."
"So you did," said Father Flanagan.
"And if your next question is going to be:
Could a religious man go out to the stars and still retain his faith; could he
go out and come back full of faith; would travelling to the stars take away
something of the true belief he held? Then I'd have to ask you to define your
terms."
"My terms?" asked Father Flanagan
amazed.
"Yes, faith, for one thing. What do you
mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith
alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of
believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof,
the true mark of a Christian? Or should the Church long since - "
Father Flanagan raised a hand. "My
son!" he said. "My son!"
"Forget it, Father. I should not have said
it.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Time is
the Simplest Thing")
"Once
again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in
some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he
knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer
understanding and acceptance of it.
He probed and sensed and learned and there was
no such thing as time, but a great foreverness.
He thought with pity of those others locked
inside the ship, safe behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the
glories of the innards of a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of
knowing far above the flat galactic plane.
Yet he really did not know what he saw or
probed; he merely sensed and felt it and became a part of it, and it became a
part of him - he seemed unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of
dimension or of content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so
overwhelming that it was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this
place, it seemed, there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that
it was a place apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and
emotion had no place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools
or measuring stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.
There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder
- and no actual knowledge, either."
(Clifford D. Simak: "All the
Traps of Earth")
"... Perhaps
all that had happened had been no more than the working out of human destiny.
If the human race could not attain directly the paranormal power he held, this
instinct of the mind, then they would gain it indirectly through the agency of
one of their creations. Perhaps this, after all, unknown to Man himself, had
been the prime purpose of the robots.
He turned and walked slowly down the length of
village street, his back turned to the ship and the roaring of the captain,
walked contentedly into this new world he'd found, into this world that he
would make - not for himself, nor for robotic glory, but for a better Mankind
and a happier.
Less than an hour before he'd congratulated
himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing
that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this
present planet.
But that was wrong, he told himself. The trap
had not been on this world at all, nor any other world. It had been inside
himself.
He walked serenely down the wagon-rutted track
in the soft, golden afternoon of a matchless autumn day, with the dog trotting
at his heels.
Somewhere, just down the street, the sick baby
lay crying in its crib."
(Clifford D. Simak: "All the
Traps of Earth")
"...my
(characters) are quite ordinary folk having in their makeups the same
weaknesses and strengths as are found in most of us..."
"I like (losers) because they are
much more interesting than winners..."
(Clifford D. Simak: Foreword to
"Skirmish")
"And
that had not been the first time nor had it been the last, but all the
years of killing boiled down in essence to that single
moment-not the time that came after, but that long and terrible instant when he
had watched the lines of men purposefully striding up the slope to kill him.
It had been in
that moment that he (Enoch) had
realized the insanity of war, the futile gesture that in time
became all but meaningless, the unreasoning rage that must be
nursed long beyond the memory of the incident that had caused
the rage, the sheer illogic that one man, by death of misery, might
prove a right or uphold a principle.
Somewhere, he thought,
on the long backtrack of history, the human race had accepted an insanity for a
principle and had persisted in it until today that
insanity-turned-principle stood ready to wipe out, if
not the race itself, at least all of those things, both material and
immaterial, that had been fashioned as symbols of humanity through many
hard-won centuries."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Way
Station")
"The
sun was setting, throwing a fog-like dusk across the stream and trees, and
there was a coolness in the air. It was time, I knew, to be getting back to
camp. But I did not want to move. For I had the feeling that this was a place,
once seen, that could not be seen again. If I left and then came back, it would
not be the same; no matter how many times I might return to this particular
spot the place and feeling would never be the same, something would be lost or
something would be added, and there never would exist again, through all
eternity, all the integrated factors that made it what it was in this magic
moment."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Cemetery
World",
(orig. publ. in three parts in Analog, Nov.,
Dec. 1972, Jan. 1973;
New York, Putnam, 1973; a novel;
Berkley Medallion Books, New York 1974, p. 39)
"(The
census-taker, or Ronex from the planet Abernax, said:) ".... I find it
a most intriguing and amusing thing that it might be possible to package the
experiences, not only of one's self, but of other people. Think of the hoard we
might then lay up against our later, lonely years when all old friends are gone
and the opportunity for new experiences have withered. All we need to do then
is to reach up to a shelf and take down a package that we have bottled or
preserved or whatever the phrase might be, say from a hundred years ago, and
uncorking it, enjoy the same experience again, as sharp and fresh as the first
time it had happened....
I have tried to imagine ... the various
ingredients one might wish to compound in such a package. Beside the bare
experience itself, the context of it, one might say, he should want to capture
and hold all the subsidiary factors which might serve as a background for it -
the sound, the feel of wind and sun, the cloud floating in the sky, the color
and the scent. For such a packaging, to give the desired results, must be as
perfect as one can make it. It must have all those elements which would be
valuable in invoking the total recall of some event that had taken place many
years before...""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Cemetery
World",
(orig. publ. in three parts in Analog, Nov.,
Dec. 1972, Jan. 1973;
New York, Putnam, 1973; a novel;
Berkley Medallion Books, New York 1974, p. 147)
""As
an auxiliary to all of this," he said, "I have found myself
speculating upon a world in which no one ever grew up. I admit, of course, that
it is a rather acrobatic feat of thinking, not entirely consistent, to leap
from the one idea to the other. In a world where one was able to package his
experiences, he merely would be able to relive at some future time the
experiences of the past. But in a world of the eternally young he'd have no
need of such packaging. Each new day would bring the same freshness and the
everlasting wonder inherent in the world of children. There would be no
realization of death and no fear born of the knowledge of the future. Life
would be eternal and there'd be no thought of change. One would exist in an
everlasting matrix and while there would be little variation from one day to
the next, one would not be aware of this and there'd be no boredom...""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Cemetery
World",
(orig. publ. in three parts in Analog, Nov.,
Dec. 1972, Jan. 1973;
New York, Putnam, 1973; a novel;
Berkley Medallion Books, New York 1974, p. 148)
"A wrongness persisted, a sense of aberration,
some factor not quite right, the feeling of a corner. But Boone could
not pin it down; there seemed no way to reach it."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books
(A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 20)
"A
dull thud hit them, buckling them at the knees, and the plaster of the suite
began to crack, fissures starting at the corners of the ceiling to run
obliquely across it. The floor began to sag.
Boone grasped desperately at Corcoran, throwing both
arms around him tightly.
And they were in another place, in another
suite, a suite where there was no plaster cracking, no slumping of the floor.
Corcoran pulled angrily away from Boone.
"What the hell was that?" he shouted. "Why did you
grab...?"
"The Everest is going down," said
Boone. "Look out the window. See the dust."
"It can't be. We're still in the
Everest."
"Not any longer," said Boone.
"We're in that box you saw. We stepped around a corner.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 21-22)
"(Boone said:) "... Every time before,
I stepped into a sort of limbo - a gray, flat world of some kind of fog, with
no real features. But this time, we stepped into a real place - this box. I
can't be entirely sure, but I think I'm right.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 22)
"(Timothy
said:)"... We're very close to immortal, you know. The time mechanism
keeps it that way."
"No, I hadn't known," said Boone.
"Inside the time bubble we do not age. We
age only when we are outside of it.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 34)
""They
(human race) changed," said Enid, "from corporeal beings, from
biological beings, to incorporeal beings, immaterial, pure intelligences. They
now are ranged in huge communities on crystal lattices...""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 37)
"What
your friend told you of his seeing of the time wall is true, Henry said in
Boone's mind. I know he saw it, although imperfectly. Your friend is most
unusual. So far as I know, no other human actually can see it; although there
are ways of detecting time. I tried to show him a sniffler. There are a number
of snifflers, trying to sniff out the bubble. They know there's something
strange, but don't know what it is."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 43-44)
""We
have time travel," she (Enid) said, "and none of us, I am
sure, really understands it. We stole it from the Infinites. To steal time
travel was the one way we could fight back, the one way we could flee. The
human race had far space travel before the Infinites showed up. I think it was
our far travel that aroused the interest of the Infinites in us. I've often
wondered if some of the very primitive principles of time might not have made
our many-times-faster-than-light travel possible. Time is somehow tied into
space, but I have never known quite how.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 60)
"He (Boone) stirred again, halfway
between sleep and wakefulness, and he was not alone. Across the fire from him
sat, or seemed to sit, a man wrapped in some all-enveloping covering that might
have been a cloak, wearing on his head a conical hat that dropped down so far
it hid his face. Beside him sat the wolf - the wolf, for Boone was certain that
it was the same wolf with which he'd found himself sitting nose to nose when he
had wakened the night before. The wolf was smiling at him, and he had never
known that a wolf could smile.
He stared at the hat. Who are you? What is this
about?
He spoke in his mind, talking to himself, not
really to the hat. He had not spoken aloud for fear of startling the wolf.
The Hat replied. It is about the brotherhood of
life. Who I am is of no consequence. I am only here to act as an interpreter.
An interpreter for whom?
For the wolf and you.
But the wolf does not talk.
No, he does not talk. But he thinks. He is
greatly pleased and puzzled.
Puzzled I can understand. But pleased?
He feels a sameness with you. He senses
something in you that reminds him of himself. He puzzles what you are.
In time to come, said Boone, he will be one with
us. He will become a dog.
If he knew that, said The Hat, it would not
impress him. He thinks now to be one with you. An equal. A dog is not your
equal..."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 79-80)
"Perversity,
she (Enid) thought. Could that have been what happened to the human race
- a willing perversity that set at naught all human values which had been so hardly
won and structured in the light of reason for a span of more than a million
years? Could the human race, quite out of hand and with no sufficient reason,
have turned its back upon everything that had built humanity? Or was it,
perhaps, no more than second childhood, a shifting of the burden off one's
shoulders and going back to the selfishness of the child who romped and
frolicked without thought of consequence or liability?"
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 95)
""It
is a net," said Horseface, "useful for the fishing of the
universe."
Enid crinkled up her face, staring at what he
called a net. It was a flimsy thing and it had no shape.
"Certainly," she said, "you would
not go fishing the universe in so slight a thing as this."
"Time means nothing to it," said
Horseface, "nor does space. It is independent of both time and space
except as it makes use of them.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 103-104)
"Boone
gulped and swallowed. He spoke to The Hat. "You said the Highway to
Eternity?"
That is not what I said. I said the Highway of
Eternity.
"Small difference," Boone told him.
Not so small as you might think."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 157)
""This
is the core of the galaxy," Horseface said. "This is the very center
of everything there is. A huge black hole eating up the galaxy. The end of
everything."
A bitter wind was blowing, although there should
not have been a wind. It had the icy chill of emptiness, the black glacial kiss
of death. It could be, Boone thought, the black frost of defeated Time fleeing
from the annihilation eating at the center."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 172)
""Much of what we see in the
universe," said Hugo, "starts out as imaginary. Often you must
imagine something before you can come to terms with it.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 218)
"(Henry
said:) ... an untold time ago, there was a well-founded perception that the
human race would end and that something else must take its place.
(The tree said:) Why must something else take
its place?
(Henry said:) I cannot tell you that. There is
no solid rationale for it, but the belief seemed to be that there must be a
dominant race upon this planet. Before men were the dinosaurs and before the
dinosaurs there were the trilobites..."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 264)
"(Enid
said:) "... Without consciousness and intelligence, the universe would
lack meaning.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Highway
of Eternity",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1986.
first mass market edition 1988; p. 276)