AS he came nearer, he made out more and more of the detail of the place. When he was only a mile or two away, he stopped and looked at it and knew what it was.
It was not a city, but a factory, a giant, sprawling factory and to it came, continually, the strange flying things that probably were planes, but looked more like flying boxcars. Most of them came from the north and west and they came flying low, not too fast, to land in an area behind a screen of buildings that stood between him and the landing field.
And the creatures that moved about among the buildings were not men—or did not seem to be men, but something else, metallic things that flashed in the last rays of the Sun.
All about the buildings, standing on great towers, were cupshaped discs many feet across and all the faces of the discs were turned toward the Sun and the faces of the discs glowed as if there were fires inside them.
He walked slowly toward the buildings and realized for the first time the sheer vastness of them. They covered acre after acre and they towered many stories high and the things that ran among them on their strange and many errands were not men, nor anything like men, but self-propelled machines.
Some of the machines he could identify, but most of them he couldn’t. He saw a carrying machine rush past with a load of lumber clutched within its belly and a great crane lumber by at thirty miles an hour with its steel jaws swinging. But there were others that looked like mechanistic nightmares and all of them went scurrying about in a terrific hurry.
He found a street, or, if not a street, an open space between two buildings, and went along it, keeping close to the side of one, for it would have been inviting death to walk down the center, where the machines were racing around.
He came to an opening in the building, from which a ramp led out to the street, and he cautiously climbed the ramp and looked inside. The interior was lighted, although he could not see where the light came from, and he looked down long avenues of machinery, busily at work. But there was no noise—that, he knew now, was what had bothered him. Here was a factory and it was utterly silent except for the sound of metal on the earth as the self-propelled machines flashed, along the street.
He left the ramp and went down the street, hugging the building, and came out on the edge of the airfield where the aerial boxcars were landing and taking off.
He watched the machines land and disgorge their freight, great piles of shining, newly sawed lumber, which were at once snatched up by the carrying machines and hustled off in all directions. Great gouts of raw ore, more than likely iron, were dumped into the maw of other carrying machines that looked, or so Vickers thought, like so many pelicans.
Once the boxcar had unloaded it took off again—took off without a single sound, as if a wind had seized and wafted it into the upper air.
The flying things came in endless streams, disgorging their endless round of cargo, which was taken care of almost immediately. Nothing was left piled up. By the time the machine had lifted into the air, the cargo it had carried had been rushed off somewhere.
Their operation was not automatic, for to have been automatic, each operation must have been performed at a certain place and at a regular time, and each ship did not land in exactly the same place, nor was the time of their arrival spaced regularly. But each time a ship landed, the appropriate carrying machine would be on hand to take charge of the cargo.
LIKE intelligent beings, Vickers thought, and even as he thought of it, he knew that that was exactly what they were—robots, each designed to take care of its own particular task. Not the manlike robots of one’s imagination, but practical machines with intelligence and purpose.
The Sun had set and as he stood at the corner of the building, he looked up at the towers which had faced it. The discs atop the towers were slowly turning back toward the east, so that when the Sun came up next morning, they would be facing it.
Solar power, thought Vickers—where else had he heard of solar power? Why, in the mutant-produced houses, the dapper little salesman had explained to Ann and him how, when you had a solar plant, you could dispense with public utilities.
And here again was solar power. Here, too, were frictionless machines that ran without the faintest noise, like the Forever car that would not wear out, but would last through many generations.
The machines paid no attention to him. It was as if they did not see him, did not suspect that he was there. Not one of them faltered as they rushed past him, not a single one had moved out of its way to give him a wider berth. Nor had any made a threatening motion toward him.
With the going of the Sun, the area was lighted, but once again he could not determine the source of the light. The fall of night did not halt the work. The flying boxcars, great, angular, boxlike contraptions, still came flying in, unloaded and flew off again. The machines kept up their scurrying. The long lines of machines within the buildings continued their soundless labor.
The flying boxcars, he wondered, were they robots, too? And the answer seemed to be that they probably were.
He edged his way onto the platform and looked at some of the crates closely, trying to determine what it was they held, but the only designations on them were stenciled code letters and numerals. He thought of prying some of them open, but he had no tools to do it, and he was just a bit afraid to do it, for while the machines continued to pay no attention to him, they might pay disastrous attention if he interfered.
Hours later, he came out on the other side of the sprawling factory area and walked away from it, then turned back and looked at it and saw it glowing with its strange light and sensed the bustle of it.
He looked back at the factory and wondered what was made there and thought that he could guess. Probably razor blades and lighters and maybe light bulbs and perhaps the houses and the Forever cars. Maybe all of them.
For this, he felt certain, was the factory—or at least one of the factories—that Crawford and North American Research had been looking for and had failed to find.
No wonder, he thought, that they failed to find it.
XXXI
VICKERS came to the river late in the afternoon, a river filled with tree-covered, grape-vined islands, clogged with sandbars and filled with wicked gurgling and the hiss of shifting sands. He was sure it could be no other stream than the Wisconsin, flowing through its lower reaches to join the Mississippi. And if that were so, he knew where he was going.
Now he feared that in this land there was no Preston house. Rather, he had fallen upon a strange land where there were no men, only a complex robotic civilization in which Man played no part. There were no men connected with the factory, he was sure, for the place had been too self-sufficient to need the hand or the brain of Man.
He camped on the river’s shore, and sat for a long time before he went to sleep, staring out over the silvered mirror of the moonlit water, feeling the loneliness strike into him, a deeper, more bitter loneliness than he’d ever known before.
When morning came, he’d go on; he’d tread the trail to its dusty end. He’d find the place where the Preston house should stand and when he found that there was no house—what would he do then?
He did not think about that. He did not want to think about it. He finally went to sleep.
In the morning he went down the river and studied the bluff-studded southern shore and was more sure than ever that he knew where he was.
He followed the river down and finally saw the misty blue of the great rock-faced bluff that rose at the junction of the rivers and the thin violet line of the cliffs beyond the greater river, so he climbed the nearest one and spied out the valley he had hunted.
He camped that night in the valley and the next morning followed it and found the other branching valley that should lead to the Preston house.
He was halfway up it before it became familiar, although he had seen rock formations that seemed to bear some similarity to ones he had seen before.
The suspicion and the hope grew in him, and at
last the certainty, that, here once again was the enchanted valley he had traveled twenty years before!
And now, he thought—now if the house is there.
He felt faint and sick at the certainty that it would not be there, that he would reach the valley’s head and see where it should have been, but wasn’t. For if that happened, he was an exile from Earth. He wouldn’t know how to get back.
HE found the path and followed it and he saw the wind blow across the meadow grass so that it seemed as if the grass were water and the whiteness of its wind-blown stems were white-caps rolling on it. He saw the clumps of crab-apple trees and they were not in bloom because the season was too late, but they were the same nevertheless.
The path turned around the shoulder of a hill. Vickers stopped and looked at the house standing on the hill. He felt his knees go wobbly beneath him and he looked away quickly, then brought his eyes back to make sure it was not imagination, that the house was really there.
It really was.
He started up the path and discovered that he was running and forced himself down to a rapid walk. And then he was running again and he didn’t try to stop.
He reached the hill that led up to the house and he went more slowly now, trying to regain his breath, and he thought what a sight he was, with weeks of beard upon his face, with his clothing ripped and tom and matted with the dirt and filth of travel, with his shoes falling to shreds, tied upon his feet with strips of cloth from his trouser legs, with his frayed trousers blowing in the wind, showing dirt-streaked knees.
He came to the white picket fence and stopped beside the gate and leaned upon it, looking at the house. It was exactly as he had remembered it, neat, well-kept, with the lawn trimmed and flowers growing brightly, the woodwork newly painted and the brick a mellow color attesting to years of Sun upon it and the force of wind and rain.
“Kathleen,” he said, and he couldn’t say the name too well, for his lips were parched and rough. “I’ve come back again.”
He wondered what she’d look like, after all these years. He must not, he warned himself, expect to see the girl he once had known, the girl of seventeen or eighteen, but a woman near his own age.
She would see him standing at the gate and even with the beard and the tattered clothes and the weeks of travel on him, she would know him and would open the door and come down the walk to greet him.
The door opened and the Sun was in his eyes so that he could not see her until she’d stepped out on the porch.
“Kathleen,” he said.
But it wasn’t Kathleen.
It was someone he’d never seen before—a man who had on almost no clothes at all and who glittered as he walked down the path and who said to Vickers, “Sir, what can I do for you?”
XXXII
THERE was something about the glitter of the man, something about the way he walked and the way he talked that didn’t feel right. He had no hair, for one thing, either on his head or on his chest. His eyes were funny, too. They glittered like the rest of him and he seemed to have no lips.
“I’m a robot, sir,” he explained, seeing Vickers’ puzzlement.
“Oh,” said Vickers.
“My name is Hezekiah.”
“How are you, Hezekiah?” Vickers asked inanely, not knowing what else to say.
“I’m all right,” replied Hezekiah. “I am always all right. There is nothing to go wrong with me. But thank you for asking, sir.”
“I had hoped to find someone here,” said Vickers. “A Miss Kathleen Preston. Does she happen to be home?”
He watched the robot’s eyes and there was no answer in them.
The robot asked, “Won’t you come in, sir, and wait?”
“Why, certainly,” said Vickers. The robot held the gate open for him and he came through, walking on the path of mellowed brick, and he noticed how tidy the house was. The windows sparkled with the cleanliness of a recent washing and the shutters hung true and straight and the trim was painted and the lawn looked as if it had not been only mowed, but razored. Gay beds of flowers bloomed without a single weed and the picket fence marched its eternal guard around the house straight as wooden soldiers and painted gleaming white.
The robot went up the steps to the little porch that opened on the side entrance and pushed the door open for Vickers.
“To your right, sir,” Hezekiah said. “Take a chair and wait. If there is anything you wish, there is a bell upon the table.”
“Thank you, Hezekiah,” said Vickers.
The room was large. It was gaily papered and had a small marble fireplace with a mirror over the mantle and there was a sort of official hush, as if the place might be an antechamber for important conferences.
Vickers took a chair and waited.
What had he expected? Kathleen bursting from the house and running down the steps to meet him, happy after twenty years of never hearing from him? He shook his head. It didn’t work that way. It wasn’t logical that it should.
But there were other things that were not logical, either, and they had worked out. It had not been logical that he should find this house in this other world, and still he had found it and now sat beneath its roof and waited. It had not been logical that he should find the top he had not remembered and, finding it, know what to use it for. But he had found it and he had used it and was here.
HE sat quietly, listening to the house.
There was a murmur of voices in the room that opened off the waiting room and he saw that the door which led into it was open an inch or two.
There was no other sound. The house lay in morning quiet.
He got up from his chair and paced to the window and from the window back to the marble fireplace.
Who was in that other room? Why was he waiting? Whom would he see when he walked through that door and what would they say to him?
He stopped beside the door, standing with his back against the wall, holding his breath to listen.
THE murmur of voices became words.
“. . . going to be a shock.”
A deep, gruff voice said, “It always is a shock. There’s nothing you can do to take the shock away. No matter how you look at it, it always is degrading.”
A slow, drawling voice said, “It’s unfortunate that we have to work it the way we do. It’s too bad we can’t let them go on in their rightful bodies.”
Businesslike; clipped, precise, the first voice said, “Most of the androids take it fairly well. Even knowing what it means, they take it fairly well. We make them understand. And, of course, out of the three, there’s always the lucky one, the one that can go on in his actual body.”
“I have a feeling,” said the gruff voice, “that we started in on Vickers just a bit too soon.”
“Flanders said we had to. He thinks Vickers is the only one who can handle Crawford.”
And Flanders’ voice saying, “I am sure he can. He was a late starter, but he was coming fast. We gave it to him hard. First the bug got careless and he caught it and that set him to thinking. Then, after that, we arranged the lynching threat. Then he found the top we planted and the association clicked. Give him just another jolt or two . . .”
“How about the girl, Flanders? That—what’s her name?”
“Ann Carter,” Flanders said. “We’ve been jolting her a bit, but not as hard as Vickers.”
“How will they take it?” asked the drawling voice, “when they find they’re android?”
Vickers lurched away from the door, groping with his hands, as if he were walking in the dark through a room filled with furniture.
Used, he thought.
Not even human.
“Damn you, Flanders!” he said. “Damn you for a smirking heel!”
Not only he, but Ann—they were both androids.
He had to get away, he told himself. He had to find a place where he could hide and let his mind calm down and plan what he meant to do.
For he was going to do something. It wasn’t going
to stay this way. He’d deal himself a hand and cut in on the game.
He moved along the hall and reached the door and opened it a crack to see if anyone was there. The lawn was empty. There was no one in sight.
He went out the door and closed it gently behind him and when he hit the ground, jumping from the tiny porch, he was running. He went over the fence.
He didn’t look back until he reached the trees. When he did, the house stood serenely, majestically, on its hilltop at the valley’s head.
XXXIII
SO he was an android, an artificial man, a body made out of a handful of chemicals and the cunning of Man’s mind and the wizardry of Man’s technique—but ordinary, normal men had no such cunning and no such technique. The mutants did. They could make an artificial man and make him so well and cleverly that even he, himself, would never know for sure. And artificial women, too—like Ann Carter.
The mutants could make androids and robots and Forever cars and everlasting, razor blades and a host of other gadgets, all designed to wreck the race from which they sprang. They had synthesized the carbohydrate as food and the protein to make the bodies of their androids, and they knew how to travel from one earth to another—all those earths that ringed the Sun. This much he knew they could do and were doing. What other things they might be doing, he had no idea. Nor any idea, either, of the things they dreamed or planned.
“You’re a mutant,” Crawford had told him. “You’re one of them.” For Crawford had a machine that could pry into the mind and tell its owner what was in that mind, but the machine was stupid in the last analysis, for it couldn’t even tell a real man from a fake.
No mutant, but a mutant’s errand boy. Not even a man, only an artificial copy.
How many others, he wondered, could there be like him? How many of his kind were trailed and watched by Crawford’s men, unaware that they did not trail and watch the mutant, but a thing of mutant manufacture? That, thought Vickers, was the true measure of the difference between the normal man and mutant—the normal man could mistake the mutant’s scarecrow for the mutant.
The Complete Serials Page 49