"Live by Highest Grace" by Clifford Simak, summary

The plot centers on the forced journey of literature professor Edward Lansing and his companions through a strange post-apocalyptic Earth, where an alien intelligence has established a testing ground for humankind. The science fiction novel was published in 1982.

Meeting at the vending machine

Professor Lansing talks with student Jackson. The young man confesses that the flawless paper on Shakespeare was produced by a talking slot machine in the basement of the student union. Edward later finds the machine. After a brief altercation, the mechanism yields motel keys and two silver dollars.

Edward drives to the indicated address. The motel room contains twelve slot machines. Lansing deposits a dollar into the fifth machine, collecting the gold coins. Then he pulls the lever of the seventh machine and instantly vanishes into the autumn forest.

The professor’s journey leads him to the Cock-a-Doodle-Doo Tavern. Inside are General Everett Darley, Pastor Ezra Hatfield, poetess Sandra Carver, the robot Jurgens, and the newly arrived Mary Owen. At a separate table, four strangers are silently playing cards. It turns out that all the travelers have been transported from alternate realities. Mary’s world still has the British Empire, the poetess’s is in the Third Renaissance, and Jurgens’s world has been abandoned. Lansing pays the bill and supplies in gold.

The Blue Cube and the Road to the Ruins

In the morning, the six set out. At the bottom of a bowl-shaped valley, the travelers find a huge cube of smooth blue material. Around it is a perfect circle of white sand.

Jurgens steps onto a sandy strip. An invisible sentry mechanism throws the robot into the air, damaging its knee joint. The pastor pulls the injured robot out, and Edward fashions a crutch from a branch. The general and the pastor decide to abandon the crippled robot and press onward. Mary and Lansing refuse to abandon Jurgens. The team splits.

The remaining three explore the cube and find three stone slabs on the edge of the sand, as well as a buried board with a half-erased inscription in Cyrillic.

The road west takes them across rolling steppe. At night, an invisible beast scurries around the campsites, making a snorting sound. On the third night, Mary awakens in horror from a vision of giant faces in the sky, looking down at her with cold contempt. After five days of travel, the trio reaches a dead city and reunites with their companions.

Abandoned metropolis

The group occupies an empty administrative building. The city is completely deserted, the houses corroded by time, the stone turning to reddish-brown dust.

In the basement, Mary and the pastor discover a row of doors with round viewing windows. Each window opens onto a separate reality: a blooming garden with a stream, an arctic blizzard, a barren desert, a nightmarish swamp with predators, jagged stone pyramids. The pastor, hearing the chilling howl of an unknown beast from the hills in the night, breaks the bolts with a key and escapes through the door into the apple orchard.

The next day, Mary and Edward find an underground chamber with working spider-like mechanisms. The machines hum incessantly.

As soon as Lansing gets closer, his consciousness is knocked out. Edward sees himself as a cosmic giant amidst star clusters, standing at the edge of the universe before a yawning nothingness. The general, having learned of the installation, attempts to force his way through the apparatus’s components. The soldier’s body bursts into a bright light and dissolves into thin air.

Desert and abyss

The travelers abandon hopes of the general’s return and leave the city. They make their way through the badlands, climb terraces, and reach the second inn at the confluence of the streams. There, they encounter the time traveler Jorgenson and the puppet Melissa, and in the corner, they spot the silent gamblers again.

Four days later, the squad reaches a hundred-foot pink singing tower. The spire trembles in the wind and emits a quiet, monotonous sound. The poetess Sandra falls into a trance from the music and refuses to leave the base of the tower. Mary remains to guard the girl, Jorgenson and Melissa head west, and Edward and the robot head north toward the legendary Chaos.

Sand dunes give way to a wall of impenetrable darkness. At the crest of a massive dune, the sky turns into a raging waterfall of darkness, shaking the ground with a monstrous roar. Jurgens strides forward, mesmerized, falls down the slope, and disappears into the black abyss. Lansing slides down the loose sand after him.

Four gamblers suddenly appear on the ridge. They throw Edward a rope tied to a boulder and save his life.

Return and solution

Lansing hurries back to the singing tower. At the base of the spire, he finds Sandra’s desiccated body. Mary has disappeared.

Edward wanders alone to the inn, followed by a massive wolf-like beast. The innkeeper reports that the woman left that morning but lost the note. Meeting Jorgenson and Melissa, who have returned empty-handed, Edward leaves them with the survivors’ community on the river and returns to the cube.

At the foot of the blue cube, Edward encounters Mary, lost in the badlands. She realizes that the slabs they found earlier are part of a paved path. After cutting down a bush, they sweep a chain of stones from under the sand. Lansing presses the wall, and the door swings silently open.

In the blue hall, four card players with white masks sit on a bench. Sniffer fawns at Mary’s feet.

Beings from the far reaches of the galaxy explain the nature of what is happening. They observe the branching worlds, saving sentient species from inevitable self-destruction. The trap-lined road, the city’s mechanisms, the tower, and Chaos served as a testing ground for psychological selection. Most candidates surrendered or perished due to fear, fanaticism, and carelessness.

Mary and Edward have proven their resilience, compassion, and willingness to fight to the end. The creatures open a side door for them. The couple emerges onto the green lawn of a university campus on a distant planet under unfamiliar stars, where they will study and lay the foundations of a new society.