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GOOD NIGHT, MR. JAMES
Clifford D. Simak
I
HE CAME ALIVE from nothing. He became aware from unawareness.
He smelled the air of the night and heard the trees whispering on the embankment above him and the breeze that had
set the trees to whispering came down to him and felt him over with soft and tender fingers, for all the world as if it
were examining him for broken bones or contusions and abrasions.
He sat up and put both his palms down upon the ground beside him to help him sit erect and stared into the
darkness. Memory came slowly and when it came it was incomplete and answered nothing.
His name was Henderson James and he was a human being and he was sitting somewhere on a planet that was called
the Earth. He was thirty-six years old and he was, in his own way, famous, and comfortably well-off. He lived in an old
ancestral home on Summit avenue, which was a respectable address even if it had lost some of its smartness in the last
twenty years or so.
On the road above the slope of the embankment a car went past with its tires whining on the pavement and for a
moment its headlights made the treetops glow. Far away, muted by the distance, a whistle cried out. And somewhere
else a dog was barking with a flat viciousness.
His name was Henderson James and if that were true, why was he here? Why should Henderson James be sitting on
the slope of an embankment, listening to the wind in the trees and to a wailing whistle and a barking dog? Something
had gone wrong, some incident that, if he could but remember it, might answer all his questions.
There was a job to do.
He sat and stared into the night and found that he was shivering, although there was no reason why he should, for
the night was not that cold. Beyond the embankment he heard the sounds of a city late at night, the distant whine of
the speeding car and the far-off wind-broken screaming of a siren. Once a man walked along a street close by and
James sat listening to his footsteps until they faded out of hearing.
Something had happened and there was a job to do, a job that he had been doing, a job that somehow had been
strangely interrupted by the inexplicable incident which had left him lying here on this embankment.
He checked himself. Clothing... shorts and shirt, strong shoes, his wristwatch and the gun in the holster at his side.
A gun?
The job involved a gun.
He had been hunting in the city, hunting something that required a gun. Something that was prowling in the night
and a thing that must be killed.
Then he knew the answer, but even as he knew it he sat for a moment wondering at the strange, methodical,
step-by-step progression of reasoning that had brought him to the memory. First his name and the basic facts
pertaining to himself, then the realization of where he was and the problem of why he happened to be there and finally
the realization that he had a gun and that it was meant to be used. It was a logical way to think, a primer schoolbook
way to work it out:
I am a man named Henderson James.
I live in a house on Summit avenue.
Am I in the house on Summit avenue?
No, I am not in the house on Summit avenue.
I am on an embankment somewhere.
Why am I on the embankment?
But it wasn't the way a man thought, at least not the normal way a normal man would think. Man thought in
shortcuts. He cut across the block and did not go all the way around.
It was a frightening thing, he told himself, this clear-around-the-block thinking. It wasn't normal and it wasn't right
and it made no sense at all... no more sense than did the fact that he should find himself in a place with no memory of
getting there.
He rose to his feet and ran his hands up and down his body. His clothes were neat, not rumpled. He hadn't been
beaten up and he hadn't been thrown from a speeding car.
There were no sore places on his body and his face was unbloody and whole and he felt all right.
He hooked his fingers in the holster belt and shucked it up so that it rode tightly on his hips. He pulled out the gun
and checked it with expert and familiar fingers and the gun was ready.
He walked up the embankment and reached the road, went across it with a swinging stride to reach the sidewalk that
fronted the row of new bungalows. He heard a car coming and stepped off the sidewalk to crouch in a clump of
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