“This world they built,” Vickers pointed out, “hasn’t been too good a world. It was built with much blood and misery; it mixed too many bones into the mortar. During all its history, there’s hardly been a year when there wasn’t violence somewhere on Earth.”
“I know what you mean,” said Crawford. “You think there should be a reorganization.”
“Something like that.”
“Let’s do some figuring then,” Crawford invited. “Let’s try to thrash it out.”
“I can’t. I have no knowledge and I have no authority. I haven’t even contacted or been contacted by these mutants of yours—if they are really mutants.”
“The analyzer says they are mutants. It said you are.”
“How can you be sure?” asked Vickers.
“You don’t trust me. You think I’m a renegade, that I see sure defeat ahead and have come running, waving the white flag, anxious to make my individual peace and to hell with all the rest of them, that maybe the mutants will keep me as a mascot or a pet.”
“If what you say is true, you and the rest of them are licked, no matter what you do.”
“Not entirely licked,” said Crawford. “We can hit back. We can raise a lot of hell.”
“With what? You only have a club.”
“We have desperation.”
“A club and desperation? That’s all?”
“We have a secret weapon.”
“And the others want to use it.”
Crawford nodded. “But it isn’t good enough, which is why I’m here.”
“I’ll get in touch with you,” said Vickers. “That’s the best that I can do. When and if I find you’re right, I’ll get in touch with you.”
CRAWFORD heaved himself out of the chair. “Make it quick as possible. I can’t hold them off long.”
“You’re scared,” said Vickers. “You were frightened the first day I saw you and you still are.”
“I’ve been scared ever since it started. It gets worse every day.”
“Two frightened men.”
“You, too?”
“Of course. Can’t you see me shaking?”
“No, I can’t. In some ways, Vickers, you’re the most coldblooded man I have ever met.”
“One thing,” said Vickers. “You said there was another mutant you could catch.”
“Yes, I told you that.”
“Any chance of knowing who?”
“Not a chance,” said Crawford.
“I didn’t think there was.”
The rug seemed to blur a little, then the top was there, spinning slowly, its hum choked off, its colors blotched with its erratic wobbling.
They stood and watched it until it stopped and lay upon the floor.
“It went away,” said Crawford.
“And now it’s back,” Vickers whispered.
Crawford shut the door behind him. Vickers stood in the cold, bright room with the motionless top on the floor, listening to Crawford’s footsteps going down the hall.
—CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
CONTINUED NEXT MONTH
Hunted down for his strangeness, Vickers found himself hemmed in with no escape. But there was a way out—into the unknown!
SYNOPSIS
WORLD industry is backed against the wall, fighting an enemy which it cannot identify. The razor blade industry has been wiped out by an everlasting blade—buy one and never have to buy another. A cigarette lighter, never needing new flints, never needing fluid, has destroyed the lighter industry. The light bulb manufacturers are out of business because of an everlasting bulb. The auto industry is threatened by a new car, guaranteed to run forever. Housing interests are faced with extinction by the introduction of new houses which are manufactured to sell at $500 a room.
As if all this were not bad enough, the cold war, in this year of 1977, still is going on, complete with incident and insult, but never quite breaking out into shooting war.
The Pretentionists are a sign of this tension—a club movement, spreading rapidly, with the members of the clubs effecting a retreat into the past by pretending that they are living in some other era.
Jay Vickers, a writer, is invited through his literary agent, Ann Carter, to meet George Crawford. Crawford, it turns out, is the head of North American Research, a front for a worldwide organization of industries which have banded together to fight the invisible company or companies which are producing the “everlasting” items. Crawford is convinced that the “everlasting” companies want to destroy the entire global economic structure.
Crawford wants Vickers to write a book exposing this threat, but Vickers refuses. Because of his refusal, he and Ann quarrel. Each of them, without realizing it (and if realizing, not admitting it) are in love with the other. Ann is angry because he could have named his price, but he insists he has a book to finish.
Vickers still remembers a girl named Kathleen Preston, with whom he was in love some 20 years before. He has managed to thrust this memory far back in his mind, but when the moppet next door asks him why he isn’t married, it all comes back to him and he recalls the day that he and Kathleen had walked in what seemed to be an enchanted valley.
Vickers and Ann visit an exhibit of the new $500-a-room houses. The deal is astonishing—Vickers, for instance, has a $20,000 home which the company would accept as a trade-in—and pay him the difference, over $15,000, in cash!
Returning home alone, Vickers finds Horton Flanders, an eccentric old neighbor, waiting to spend the evening with him. In the course of their talk, Flanders declares that he believes there is some intervening force which keeps the world from war, that this same force some 80 years before had given the world a kick in the pants, booting it out of its rut and sending it at a gallop along a new road of scientific and technological achievement.
Under Vickers’ questioning, Flanders hints at some reason to believe there must be reservoirs of knowledge in the stars and expresses a belief that Man can reach out mentally and tap those reservoirs.
After Flanders goes home, Vickers hears a mouse. There shouldn’t be any mice, since the exterminator had been there that day. He sees the mouse in a corner and hurls a paperweight at it. It comes apart, no mouse, but some contraption which Vickers believes may be a spying device.
Vickers starts out in the middle of the night to try to get out of Flanders the truth of the hints which he had dropped, only to find that Flanders has disappeared and is being hunted by a village posse.
The next day Vickers gets a letter from Flanders apologizing for causing him inconvenience by disappearing, but explaining that it was necessary that he do so. He recommends that Vickers revisit the scenes of his childhood “so you may see with clearer eyes.”
Frantically seeking a key to the mystery which appears to be centering about him, Vickers finds in his attic a book of notes, written many years before, which indicates that he is somehow different than the normal run of humans.
A friend of his, Eb, the garageman, comes to warn him that he is suspected of doing away with Flanders and that a lynch mob is forming. Eb tells him he must get away and has brought along a new Forever car in which he can make his escape.
Vickers flees to his childhood country. Revisiting his old home, now standing vacant, he finds a battered top which he had lost when a boy of eight.
He remembers an incident entirely forgotten until now, that the top once had taken him, as a child, into fairyland. Years later, he and Kathleen Preston had wandered into that same enchanted valley—from which he had brought home a flower in winter.
He tries to buy another top to try the trip again, but tops have gone out of style and there are none for sale. So he repairs the ancient one and repaints it, feeling that perhaps it will serve the purpose.
Running out of money, he calls Ann Carter to have her telegraph him funds. She tells him that Crawford is searching frantically for him.
Later that night Crawford, who has had Ann’s phone tapped in an effort to locate Vicker
s, shows up at Vickers’ hotel room. He tells Vickers that the people industry is fighting are a group of mutants who are systematically going about the reduction of Earth’s economic system as the first step in building a world in which the mutant will be the Cro-Magnon to the normal man’s Neanderthal. He says that Vickers is an unsuspecting mutant, pleads with him to work together in reaching an understanding between the mutants and the normal humans to avert war. He hints that Ann Carter also is a mutant, likewise not aware of her mutancy.
Crawford says the normal humans have a secret weapon which they will not hesitate to use to smash the mutants. All of this baffles Vickers and makes him feel helpless, for he has not been in contact with any mutants and certainly not with their organization. And he is afraid of Crawford, who is even more afraid of Vickers—which makes him all the more dangerous.
XXIV
WHEN he could hear Crawford’s footfalls no longer, Vickers went to the telephone and lifted it and gave a number, then waited for the connection to be made.
He’d have to tell Ann fast. He couldn’t waste much time, for Crawford’s wire tappers would be listening. She must be out and gone before they could reach her door.
He’d say: “Will you do something for me, Ann? Will you do it without question, without asking why?”
He’d say: “You remember that place where you asked about the stove? I’ll meet you there.”
Then he’d say: “Get out of your apartment. Get out and hide. Stay out of sight. Right this minute. Not an hour from now. Not five minutes. Not a minute. Hang up this phone and go.
It would have to be fast. It would have to be sure. It would have to be blind.
He couldn’t say, “Ann, you’re a mutant,” then have her want to know what a mutant was and how he came to know and what it meant, while all the time the listeners would be moving toward her door.
She had to go on faith. But would she?
Thinking of how she might want to argue, how she might not want to go without a reason for her going, he felt the moisture trickle out of his armpits and run down his ribs.
The phone was ringing now. He tried to recall what her apartment looked like, how the phone sat on the table at the end of the davenport, and how she would be coming across the room to lift the receiver, and in a moment he would hear her voice.
The operator said, “That number doesn’t answer, sir.”
“Try this one, then,” he said, giving the operator the number of her office.
He waited again and heard the ringing.
“That number doesn’t answer, sir,” the operator finally said.
“Thank you,” said Vickers.
“Shall I try again?”
“No,” said Vickers. “Cancel the call, please.”
He had to think and plan. He had to try to figure out what it was all about. Before this, it had been easy to seek refuge in the belief that it was imagination, that he and the world were half insane, that everything would be all right if he’d just ignore whatever might be going on.
He couldn’t believe it any longer.
For now he must accept at face value the story that Crawford had told, sitting. in this room, with his massive bulk bulging in the chair, with his face unchanging and his voice a flat monotone that pronounced threats, but gave them no inflection and also no life.
He must believe in human mutation and in a world divided and embattled. He must believe even in the fairyland of childhood, for if he actually was a mutant, then fairyland somehow was a mark of it.
HE tried to tie together the implications of Crawford’s story, tried to understand what it all might mean, but there were too many ramifications, too many random factors, too much he did not know.
There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known or, having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.
This was the next step up. This was evolution. This was how the human race advanced.
“And God knows,” said Vickers to the empty room, “it needs advancement now if it ever did.”
A band of mutants, working together, but working undercover since the normal world would turn on them with fang and claw for their very differentness if they revealed themselves.
And what was this differentness? What could they hope to do with it?
A few of the things he knew—Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and the light bulbs that did not burn out and synthetic carbohydrates that fed the hungry and helped to hold war at arm’s length from the throat of humanity.
But what else? Surely there was more than that.
Intervention, Horton Flanders had said, rocking on the porch.
Some sort of intervention that had helped the world advance and then had staved off, somehow or other, the bitter, terrible fruits of progress wrongly used.
Horton Flanders was the man who could tell him, Vickers knew. But where was Horton Flanders now?
“They’re hard to catch,” Crawford had said. “You ring doorbells and wait. You send in your name and wait. You track them down and wait. And they’re never where you think they are, but somewhere else.”
First, thought Vickers, plotting out his moves, I’ve got to get out of here and be hard to catch myself.
Second, find Ann and see that she is hidden out.
Third, find Horton Flanders and, if he doesn’t want to talk, choke it out of him.
He picked up the top and went downstairs and turned in his key. The clerk got out his bill.
“I have a message for you,” said the clerk, reaching back into the pigeonhole that held the key. “The gentleman who was up to see you a while ago gave it to me before he left.”
He handed across an envelope and Vickers ripped it open, pulled out a folded sheet.
“A funny kind of business,” said the clerk. “He’d just been talking to you.”
“Yes,” said Vickers, “it is a funny kind of business.”
The note read: Don’t try to use that car of yours. If anything happens, keep your mouth shut.
It was a very funny kind of business.
XXV
VICKERS drove toward the dawn. The road was deserted and the car ran like a fleeing thing, with no sound but the whistle of the tires as they hugged the pavement on the curves. Beside him, on the seat, the gaily painted top rolled back and forth to the motion of the car.
There were two things wrong, two immediate things:
He should have stopped at the Preston house.
He should not have used the car.
Both, of course, were foolish, and he berated himself for thinking of them. He pushed the accelerator down so that the whistle of the tires became a high, shrill scream as they took the curves.
He should have stopped at the Preston house and tried out the top. That, he told himself, was what he had planned to do, and he searched in his mind for the reasons that had made him plan it that way, but there were no reasons. If the top worked, it would work anywhere and that was all there could be to it. It wouldn’t matter where it worked, although deep inside him was a feeling that it did matter to him, at least, where it worked. There was something special about the Preston house. It was a key point—it must be a key point in this mystery of mutants.
I couldn’t take the time, he argued with himself. The first job is to get back to New York and find Ann and get her out of sight.
For Ann, he told himself, must be the other mutant, although once again, as with the Preston house, he could not be entirely sure. There was no reason, no substantial proof, that Ann Carter was a mutant.
Reason, he thought. Reason and proof. And what are they? No more than the orderly logic on which Man has built his world. Could there be inside a man another sense, another yardstick by which one could live, setting aside the matter of reason and of proof as chil
dish things which once had been good enough, though clumsy at the best? Could there be a way of knowing right from wrong, good from bad, without the endless reasoning and the dull parade of proof? Intuition? That was female nonsense. Premonition? That was superstition.
And yet were they really female nonsense and superstition? For years researchers had concerned themselves with extrasensory perception, a sixth sense that Man might hold within himself, but had been unable to develop to its full capacity.
And if extra-sensory perception were possible, then many other abilities were possible as well—the psycho-kinetic control of objects through the power of mind alone, the ability to look into the future, the recognition of time as something other than the movement of the hands upon a clock, the ability to know and manipulate unsuspected dimensional extensions of the space-time continuum.
FIVE senses, Vickers thought—the sense of smell, of sight, of hearing, of taste and touch. Those were the five that Man had known since time immemorial, but did it mean that was all he had? Were there other senses waiting in his mind for development, as the opposable thumb, the erect posture and logical thinking had been developed throughout the millenia of Man’s existence? He had evolved from a tree-dwelling, fear-shivering thing into a club-carrying animal, into a fire-making animal. He had made, first of all, the simplest of tools, then more complex tools, and finally tools so complex that they Were machines.
All of this had been done as the result of developing intelligence. Was it not possible that the development of intelligence, the development of the human senses, was not finished yet? And if this were true, why not a sixth sense, or a seventh, or an eighth, or any number of additional senses, which would come under the general heading of the natural evolution of the human race?
Was that, Vickers wondered, what had happened to the mutants, the sudden development of these additional and only half-suspected senses? Was not the mutation logical in itself—the thing that one might well expect?
He swirled through little villages still sleeping between the night and dawn and went past farm houses lying strangely naked in the half light that ran on the eastern skyline.
The Complete Serials Page 46