Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak Page A

body bobbed and swayed. The ground beneath their feet thundered like a drum and it seemed to me that I could feel the vibrations through my soles. The people yelled and whooped. Some of them standing outside the circle had began to dance and the others now joined in, dancing along with Bronco and with Elmer.
    I looked to one side of me and the old man was dancing, too, jigging wildly up and down, with his white hair flying and his white beard flapping and jerking with the violence of his motion. “Dance!” he yelled at me, his breath short and rasping in his throat. “What’s the matter, you ain’t dancing?”
    And as he said it he reached into his pocket and, hauling out the bottle, handed it to me. I reached out and grabbed it and began to dance. I pulled the cork out of the bottle and put it to my mouth while dancing and the glass of the bottle’s neck rattled on my teeth and some of the liquor sprayed onto my face and a good, solid slug of it went down my throat. It hit my gut and lay there warm and sloshing, and I danced, waving the bottle high, and I think I did some yelling, not that there was anything to yell about, but for the pure joy of the night.
    We were, all of us, pure and simple crazy—crazy with the night and fire and music. We danced without a thought or purpose. Each of us danced because all the others danced, or because two sleek machines were out there dancing, their basic awkwardness transformed to matchless grace, or perhaps we simply danced because we were alive and deep within us knew we would not always be alive.
    The moon floated in the sky and the wood smoke from the fire trailed in a slender column of whiteness up into the sky. The screeching fiddles and the twanging guitars shrieked and sobbed and sang.
    Suddenly, as if by command (although there was no command), the music stuttered to a halt and the dancing stopped. I saw the others stop and stopped myself, with the bottle still held high.
    I felt someone pawing at my lifted arm and a voice said, “The bottle, man. For pity’s sake, the bottle.”
    It was the old man. I gave him the bottle. He used it as a pointer to indicate one side of the circle and then he tucked its neck into his whiskers and tilted back his head. The bottle gurgled and his Adam’s apple jerked in concert with the gurgling.
    Looking where he’d pointed, I saw a man standing quietly there. He wore a black robe of some sort that came down to his feet and that had a cowl on it, covering his head, so that all that showed of him was the white smear of his face.
    The old man sputtered, half strangled, and took the bottle from his face. He used it to point again.
    “The census-taker,” he said.
    The people were drawing back and away from the census-taker, and on the platform the musicians sat limp, mopping their faces with their shirt sleeves.
    The census-taker stood there for a moment, with all the people gaping at him, then he floated—he didn’t walk, he floated—to the center of the dancing circle. The man with the reed instrument lifted it to his lips and began a piping that at first was the sound of the wind moving through the grasses of a meadow, then grew louder, trilling a string of notes that one could almost see hanging in the air. The violins came in softly as a background to the piping and as if from some distant place the guitars twanged a hollow sound and then the violins sobbed and the piping went insane and the guitars were humming like vibratory drums.
    Out in the circle, the census-taker was dancing, not with his feet—you couldn’t see his feet because of the robe he wore—but with his body swaying like a dish cloth hanging on a line and whipping in the wind, a strange, distorted, dangling dance such as a puppet would perform.
    He was not alone. There were others with him, many shadowy shapes that had come from nowhere and were dancing with him, the firelight shining through the unsubstantial shimmer of their ghostly bodies. They were simply