—CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
RING AROUND THE SUN
Something was going on, the shabby and dignified old man said warningly. And something was, indeed—a whole series of great benefits that had the world with its back pinned to the wall!
VICKERS got up at an hour outrageous for its earliness because Ann had phoned the night before to tell him about a man in New York that she wanted him to meet.
“I know it breaks into your schedule,” she had said, “but I don’t think this is something you can pass up.”
“I must, Ann,” he’d told her. “I’ve got the writing going now and I can’t let loose.”
“But this is the biggest thing that has ever broken. They picked you to talk to first, ahead of all the other writers. They think you’re the man to do it.”
“Publicity.”
“This is not publicity.”
“Forget it—I won’t meet the guy, whoever he is,” he had said and hung up before she could argue about it.
He was frying eggs and bacon and making toast and trying to keep one eye on the coffee maker, which was temperamental, when the doorbell rang.
He wrapped his robe around him and headed for the door.
It might be the newsboy. He had been out on the regular collection day and the boy probably had seen the light in the kitchen.
Or it might be his neighbor, Horton Flanders, who had moved in a year or so ago and who dropped over to spend an idle hour at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. He was an affable old man and distinguished-looking, although slightly moth-eaten and shabby at the edges, pleasant to talk with and a good companion, but Vickers might have wished that he were more orthodox in his visiting.
It might be the newsboy or it might be Flanders. It could scarcely be anyone else at this early hour.
HE opened the door and a moppet stood there, wrapped in a cherry-colored bathrobe and with bunny rabbit slippers on her feet. Her hair was tousled from a night of sleep, but her blue eyes sparkled at him and she gave him a pretty smile.
“Good morning, Mr. Vickers,” she said. “I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep and I saw the light on in your kitchen and I thought maybe you was sick.”
“I’m all right, Jane,” Vickers told her. “I’m just getting breakfast. Maybe you would like to eat with me.”
“Oh, yes,” said Jane. “I was hoping maybe if you was having breakfast, you’d ask me to.”
“Your mother doesn’t know you’re here, does she?”
“Mommy and Daddy are asleep. This is the day that Daddy doesn’t work and they was out awful late last night. I heard them when they came in and Mommy was telling Daddy that he drank too much and she said she wouldn’t go out with him, never again, if he drank that much, and Daddy . . .”
“Jane,” said Vickers, firmly, “I don’t think your mommy and daddy would like you to be telling this.”
“Oh, they don’t care. Mommy talks about it all the time. I heard her telling Mrs. Traynor she had half a mind to divorce my daddy. Mr. Vickers, what is divorce?”
“I can’t recall ever hearing the word before. Maybe we oughtn’t to talk about what your mommy says. And look, you got your slippers all wet crossing the grass.”
“It’s kind of wet outside. The dew is awful heavy.”
“You come in,” said Vickers, “and I’ll dry your feet and then we’ll have some breakfast and call your mommy so she’ll know where you are.”
She came in and he closed the door.
“You sit on that chair,” he said, “and I’ll get a towel. I’m afraid you might catch cold.”
“Mr. Vickers, you aren’t married, are you?”
“Why, no. It happens that I’m not.”
“Most everyone is married,” said Jane. “Most everyone I know. Why aren’t you married, Mr. Vickers?”
“I don’t rightly know. Never found a girl, I guess.”
“There are lots of girls.”
“There was a girl,” said Vickers. “A long time ago, there was a girl.”
It had been years, he realized moodily, since he had remembered. He had forced the years to obscure the memory, to hide it away so that he did not think of it, and if he did think of it, to make it so far away and hazy that he could quit thinking of it. But here it was again.
There had been a girl and an enchanted valley they had walked in, a springtime valley, he remembered, with the pink of wild crab apple blossoms flaming on the hills and the song of bluebird and of lark soaring in the sky, and there had been a wild spring breeze that ruffled the water and blew along the grass so that the meadow seemed to flow and become a lake with whitecaps rolling on it.
They had walked in the valley and there was no doubt that it was enchanted, for when he had gone back again, the valley wasn’t there—or at least not the same valley. It had been a very different valley.
He had walked there twenty years ago and through all of twenty years he had hidden it away, back in the attic of his mind, yet now it had returned, as fresh and shining as if it had been only yesterday.
“Mr. Vickers,” said Jane, “I think your toast is burning.”
II
AFTER Jane had gone and he had washed the dishes, he remembered that he had intended for a week or more to call Joe about the mice.
“You got what?” Joe asked when he phoned.
“Mice,” said Vickers. “Little animals. They run around the place. You never heard of a house with mice?”
“Now that’s funny,” said Joe. “A well-built place like yours, it shouldn’t have no mice. You want me to come over and get rid of them?”
“I guess you’ll have to. I tried traps, but these mice don’t go for them. Got a cat a while back and the cat left. Only stayed a day or two.”
“That’s a funny thing. Cats like places where they can catch a mouse.”
“This cat was crazy,” said Vickers. “Acted like it was spooked. Walked around on tiptoe.”
“Cats is funny animals,” Joe confided.
“I’m going down to the city today. Figure you could do it while I’m gone?”
“Sure thing. The exterminating business is kind of slack right now. I’ll come over ten o’clock or so.”
“I’ll leave the front door unlocked,” said Vickers.
He hung up the phone and got the paper off the stoop. At his desk, he laid down the paper and picked up the sheaf of manuscript, holding it in his hand, feeling the thickness and the weight of it, as if by its thickness and its weight he might reassure himself that what it held was good, that it was not labor wasted, that it said the many things he wished to say and said them well enough so that other men and women might read the words and know the naked thought that lay behind the coldness of the print.
He should not waste the day, he told himself. He should stay here and work instead of traipsing off to meet this man his agent wanted him to meet. But Ann had been insistent and had said that it was important, and even when he had told her about the car being in the garage for repairs, she still had insisted that he come. That story about the car had been a fib, of course, for he knew even as he told her that Eb would have it ready for him to make the trip.
He looked at his watch and saw he had no more than half an hour until Eb’s garage would open and half an hour was not worth his while to spend in writing.
HE picked up the paper and went out on the porch to read the morning’s news.
He thought about little Jane and what a sweet kid she was and how she’d praised his cooking and chattered on and on.
“You aren’t married,” Jane had said. “Why aren’t you married, Mr. Vickers?”
And he had said, “Once there was a girl. I remember now. Once there was a girl.”
Her name had been Kathleen Preston and she had lived in a big brick house that sat up on a hill, a many-columned house with a wide porch and fanlights above the doors—an old house that had been built in the first flush of pioneer optimism, when the country had been new. The
house had still stood when the land had failed and washed away in ditches and left the hillsides scarred with gullied yellow clay.
He had been young then, so young that it hurt him now to think of it; so young he could not understand that a girl who lived in an ancestral home with fanlights above the doors and a pillared portico could not seriously consider a boy whose father farmed a wornout farm where the corn grew slight and sickly. Or rather, perhaps, it had been her family that could not consider it, for she also must have been too young to fully understand. Perhaps she had quarreled with her family; perhaps there had been angry words and tears. That was something he had never known. For between that walk down the enchanted valley and the next time he had called, they had bundled her off to a school somewhere in the East and that was the last he had seen or heard of her.
For remembrance sake, he had walked the valley again, alert to catch something that would spell out for him the enchantment of that day he had been with her. But the crab apples had dropped their blossoms and the lark did not sing so well and the enchantment had fled into some never-never land. She had taken the magic with her.
The paper fell out of his lap and he bent to pick it up. Opening it, he saw that the news was following the same drab pattern of all other days.
The latest peace rumor still was going strong and the cold war still was boiling like dry ice on a hot fire.
The cold war had been going on for years, of course, with crisis after crisis, rumor after rumor, near war always threatening and big war never breaking out, until a cold-war-weary world yawned in the face of the new peace rumors and the crises that were a dime a dozen.
Someone at an obscure college down in Georgia had set a new record at raw egg-gulping and a glamorous movie star was on the verge of changing husbands once again and the steelworkers were threatening to strike.
THERE was a lengthy feature article about missing persons and he read about half of it, all that he wanted to. It seemed that people were constantly dropping out of sight, whole families at a time, and the police throughout the land were getting rather frantic.
There always had been people who had disappeared, the article said, but they had been individuals. Now two or three families would disappear from the same community and two or three from another community and there was no trace of them at all. Usually they were from the poorer brackets. Where individuals had dropped from sight, there had been some reason for it, but in these cases of mass disappearances there seemed to be no reason beyond poverty and why one would or could disappear because of poverty was something the article writer and the people he had interviewed could not figure out.
There was a headline that read: More Worlds Than One, Says Savant.
He read part of the story:
BOSTON, MASS. (AP)—There may be another Earth just a second ahead of us and another world a second behind us and another world a second behind that one and another world a second behind . . . well, you get the idea.
A sort of continuous chain of worlds, one behind the other.
That is the theory of Dr. Vincent Aldridge . . .
Vickers let the paper drop to the floor and sat looking out across the garden. There was peace here, in this garden corner of the world, if there were nowhere else. A peace compounded of many things, of golden sunshine and the talk of summer leaves quivering in the wind, of bird and flower and sun dial, of picket fence that needed painting and an old pine tree dying quietly and tranquilly, taking its time to die, being friends with the grass and flowers and other trees all the while it died.
Here there was no rumor and no threat; here was calm acceptance of the fact that time ran on, that winter came and summer, that Sun would follow Moon and that the life one held was a gift to be cherished rather than a right that one must wrest from other living things.
Vickers glanced at his watch and saw that it was time to go.
III
EB, the garage man, hitched up his greasy britches and squinted his eyes against the smoke from the cigarette that hung from one corner of his grease-smeared mouth.
“You see, it’s this way, Jay,” he explained. “I didn’t fix your car.”
“I was going to the city,” said Vickers, “but if my car’s not fixed . . .”
“You won’t be needing that car any more. Guess that’s really why I didn’t fix it. Told myself it would be just a waste of money.”
“It’s not that bad,” protested Vickers.
“Sure, it’s got lots of miles in it. But you’re going to be buying this new Forever car.”
“Forever car? That’s a queer name for a car.”
“No, it isn’t,” Eb told him, stubbornly. “It’ll really last forever. That’s why they call it the Forever car, because it lasts forever. Fellow was in here yesterday and told me about it and asked if I wanted to take it on and I said sure I would and this fellow, he said I was smart to take it on, because, he said, there isn’t going to be any other car selling except this Forever car.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Vickers. “They may call it a Forever car, but that doesn’t mean it’ll last forever.-No car would. Twenty years, maybe, or a lifetime, but not forever.”
“That’s what this fellow told me. ‘Buy one of them,’ he says, ‘and use it all your life. When you die, will it to your son and when he dies, he can will it to his son, and so on down the line.’ It’s guaranteed to last forever. Anything goes wrong with it, they’ll fix it up or give you a new one. All except the tires. They wear out, just like on any other car. And paint, too. But the paint is guaranteed ten years. If it goes bad sooner than ten years, you get a new job free.”
“I don’t doubt a car could be made to last longer than the ones do now. But if they were built too well there’d be no replacement. It stands to reason a manufacturer in his right mind wouldn’t build a car that would last forever. He’d put himself out of business. In the first place, it would cost too much . . .”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Eb told him. “You get it complete for fifteen hundred.”
“Not much to look at, I suppose.”
“It’s the classiest job you ever laid your eyes on. Fellow that was here was driving one of them and I looked it over good. Any color you want. Lots of chrome and stainless steel. All the latest gadgets. And drive? Man, that thing drives like a million dollars. But it might take some getting used to it. I want to open the hood to take a look at the motor and, you know, that hood doesn’t open. ‘What you doing there?’ this fellow asked and I told him I wanted to look at the motor. ‘There isn’t any need to,’ this fellow says. ‘Nothing ever goes wrong with it. You never need to get at it.’ ‘But,’ I asked him, ‘where do you put in the oil?’ And you know what he said? Well, sir, he said you don’t put in no oil. ‘All you put in is gasoline,’ he tells me.
“I’ll have a dozen or so of them in within a day or so, Jay,” said Eb. “You better let me save you one.”
VICKERS shook his head. “I’m short on money.”
“That’s another thing about it. This company gives you good trade-in value. I figure I could give you a thousand for that wreck of yours.”
“It’s not worth a thousand, Eb.”
“I know it’s not. Fellow says, ‘Give them more than they’re worth. Don’t worry about what you give them. We’ll make it right with you.’ It doesn’t exactly seem the smart way to do business, but if that’s the way they want to operate, I won’t say a word against it.”
“I’d have to think about it.”
“That would leave five hundred for you to pay. I can make it easy on you. Fellow said I should make it easy. Says they aren’t so much interested in the money right now as getting a few of them Forever cars out, running on the road.”
“I don’t like the sound of it,” objected Vickers. “Here this company springs up overnight with no announcement at all with a brand-new car. You’d think there would have been something in the papers about it. If I were putting out a new car, I’d plaster
the country with advertising . . . big ads in the newspapers, announcements on television, billboards every mile or so.”
“Well, you know,” said Eb, “I thought of that one, too. I said, ‘Look, you fellows want me to sell this car and how am I going to sell it when you aren’t advertising it? How am I going to sell it when no one knows about it?’ And he said that they figured the car was so good everyone would up and tell everybody else. Said there isn’t any advertising that can beat word of mouth. Said they’d rather save the money for advertising to cut down the cost of the car.”
“I can’t understand it.”
“It does sort of hit you that way,” Eb admitted. “This gang that’s putting out the Forever car isn’t losing any money on it, you can bet your boots on that. Be crazy if they did. And if they aren’t losing any money at it, can you imagine what the rest of them companies have been making all these years—two or three thousand for a pile of junk that falls apart second time you take it out?”
“When you get the cars in,” said Vickers, “I’ll be down to take a look at them. We might make a deal.”
“Sure. You say you was going to the city?”
Vickers nodded.
“Be a bus along any minute now,” said Eb. “Catch it down at the drugstore corner. Get you there in a couple of hours. Those fellows really wheel it.”
“I guess I could take a bus. I never thought of it.”
“I’m sorry about the car,” said Eb. “If I’d known you was going to use it, I’d have fixed her up. Not much wrong with it. But I wanted to see what you thought about this other deal before I run you up a bill.”
THE drugstore corner looked somehow unfamiliar and Vickers puzzled about it as he walked down the street toward it. Then, when he got closer, he saw what it was that was unfamiliar.
Several weeks ago old Hans, the shoe repairman, had taken to his bed and died and the shoe repair shop, which had stood next to the drugstore for almost uncounted years, finally had been closed.
The Complete Serials Page 38