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

thing as a perfect torture, for always in the end the victim dies or gives in and the torture halts. There is no way of measuring what a man’s resistance is. Sometimes you overdo it and he dies, other times you allow the victim to escape the full rigor of the execution for fear that he has reached the limit of endurance, which he hasn’t.”
    “A perfect torture!” I said and I know my words must have been both a question and an exclamation point. For even then I didn’t understand. Even then I couldn’t understand why a man should be interested, even academically, in a perfect torture. Such interest seemed to verge on madness.
    It was fantastic—sitting there in that old Wisconsin farmhouse with the first winter’s storm raging against the windows, to hear a man talk calmly and learnedly about the technical problems of efficient torture past and present.
    “Perhaps in hell,” said Foster Adams, “but certainly not on earth. For human beings are crude things and the things they do are crude.”
    “Hell?” I asked him. “Do you believe in hell? A literal hell?”
    He laughed at me and from the laugh I could not tell whether he did or not.
    I looked at my watch and it was almost midnight. “I must be going now,” I said. “The storm seems to have slackened a bit.”
    But I made no move to rise from my chair, for certainly, I thought, a hint as broad as that would get me an invitation for the night.
    Adams said merely, “I’m sorry you must go. I had hoped you could stay another hour.”
    I was so angry as I trudged down the hill, back to the car, that I did not hear the feet behind me for some time. They must, I am sure, have followed me from the house but I did not hear them.
    The storm had slackened and the wind was dying down and here and there the stars were shining through the scudding clouds.
    I was halfway down the hill before I heard the footsteps, although thinking back upon it, I am certain that I had been hearing them for some time before I became aware of them. And hearing them, I knew they were made not by man but by some animal, for I could hear the click of hoofs and the cracking of hocks as they skidded on the ice that lay beneath the snow.
    I stopped and swung around but there was nothing on the road behind me, although the footsteps kept coming on. But when they had drawn close they stopped and waited, only to start up again as soon as I went on, following me down the hill, letting me set the pace, keeping just out of sight.
    A cow, I thought, although that seemed strange, for I was sure that Adams had no cow and cows as a rule do not wander down a road on a stormy night. And the hoofbeats too were not those of a cow.
    I stopped several times and once I shouted at the thing that followed and after the third or fourth time I realized it no longer followed me.
    Somehow I got the car turned around. Before I reached the main highway the machine bogged down three times but by dint of good luck and some profanity I got moving again. The highway was easier traveling and I reached home shortly after dawn.
    Three days later I had a letter from Adams that was a half apology. He had been overworked, he said, and not quite himself. He hoped that I would overlook any eccentricity. But he did not mention his lack of hospitality. I presume that came under the heading of “eccentricity.”
    It was almost a year before I saw him again. By roundabout fashion I learned that his old manservant had died and that now he lived alone. I thought about him often, feeling that he must be lonely, for the servant had been, it seemed, his only human contact. But I was still a little put out by the snowstorm incident and I made no move to visit him again.
    Then I got a second letter, really no more than a note. He indicated that he had something of interest to show me and that he would feel obliged if I would stop by the next time I happened to be in his section of the country. There was no word of the manservant’s