Here on this earth, the pastoral-feudal culture was only the first step. It as a resting place for education and for settling down. Things would change or be changed. The son of the man in whose house he lay would build a better house and probably would have robots to work his fields, while he himself would live a leisured life. Out of a leisured people, with their energies channeled by good leadership, would come paradise on Earth—or on many earths.
There had been that article in the paper he had read on that morning—was it only days ago?—which had said that the authorities were alarmed at mass disappearances. While families were dropping out of sight for no apparent reason and with nothing in common except abject poverty. And, of course, it would be the very poor who would be taken first—the homeless and the jobless and the sick—to be settled on these earths that followed in the track of the dark and bloody world inhabited by Man.
Soon there would be little more than a handful of people on the dark and bloody Earth. Soon, in a thousand years or less, it would go tumbling on its way alone, its hide cleansed of the ravening tribe which had eaten at it and mangled it and ravished it. This same tribe would be established on other earths, under better guidance, to create for themselves a better life.
Beautiful—and yet there was this matter of the. androids.
BEGIN at the beginning, he told himself. Start with first facts, try to see the logic of it, to figure out the course of mutation.
There always had been mutants. If there had not been, Man would still be a little skittering creature hiding in the jungle.
There had been the mutation of the opposable thumb. There had been mutations within the little brain that made for creature cunning. Some mutation, unrecorded, had captured fire and tamed it. Another mutation had evolved the wheel. Still another had invented the bow and arrow. And so it went, on down the ages, mutation on mutation, building the ladder that mankind climbed.
Except that the creature who had captured and tamed the flame did not know he was a mutant. And neither had the tribesman who had thought up the wheel, nor the bow and arrow experimenter.
Down through the ages there had been unsuspected and unsuspecting mutants—men who were successful beyond the success of others, great business figures or great statesmen, great writers, great scientists and artists, men who stood so far above the herd of their fellow men that they had seemed like giants in comparison.
Perhaps not all of them were mutants, but some of them would have been. But their mutancy would have been a crippled thing in comparison with what it could have been, for they were forced to conform to the social and economic pattern set by a nonmutant society. That they had been able to conform, to fit themselves to a smaller measure than their normal stature, that they had been able to get along with men who were less than they and still stand out as men of towering ability was in itself a measure of their mutancy.
Although their success had been large in the terms of normal men, their mutancy had been a failure in that it never reached its full realization and this was because these men had never known that they were mutants. They had been just a little smarter or a little handier or somewhat quicker than the common run of mankind.
But suppose that a man should know from a piece of indisputable evidence that he was a mutant what would happen then?
Suppose, for example, a man should find that he could reach out to the stars and that he could catch the thoughts and plans of the thinking creatures who lived on planets circling those far suns—that would be full and sufficient proof that he was a mutant. And if he could obtain from his seeking in the stars some specific information of certain economic value—say, the principle of a frictionless machine—then without question he would know that he had a mutant gift. Once knowing that he was a mutant, he would not be able to fit so snugly, nor so smugly, into his contemporary niche as those men who had been mutants, but had never known they were. Knowing that he was a mutant, he would have the itch of greatness, would know the necessity of following his own path and not the beaten path.
HE might be slightly terrified by the things he learned winnowing the stars and he might be terribly lonesome and he might see the necessity of other humans than he alone working on the information that he was dredging from the depths of space.
So he would seek for other mutants and he would do it cleverly and it might take him a long time before he found one of them and he would have to approach the other mutant cautiously and win his confidence and finally tell him what he had in mind. Then there’d be two mutants, banded together, and they would seek other mutants. Not all of them would be able to send their minds out to the stars, but they would be able to do other things. Some of them would understand electronics, almost as if by instinct, more completely than any normal man, even with years of intensive training, and another might sense the strange alignment of time and space that allowed for other worlds than one, circling the Sun like a cosmic ring of planets.
Some of the mutants would be women and to the mutants found would be added mutants born, and eventually there would be a mutant organization of several hundred persons, pooling their talents.
From the information they gathered from the stars, plus the mutant abilities of certain others of them, they would invent and market certain gadgets that would bring in the necessary money for them to continue with their work.
How many of the now common, workaday, almost prosaic gadgets used in the world today, Vickers wondered, were the products of this mutant race?
But the time would come when the mutant organization and the work they did would become too challenging to pass unnoticed and the mutants would seek a place to hide—a safe place where they could continue the work that they were doing. And what safer place could there be than one of those other earths?
VICKERS lay on the corn-shuck mattress and stared into the darkness and wondered at the glibness of his imagination, with the nagging feeling that it was not imagination—that it was something that he knew. But how could he know it?
Conditioning, perhaps, of his android mind. Or an actual knowledge gained in some period of his life that had been blotted out, as the time he had gone into fairyland at the age of eight had been—a knowledge that now was coming back again, as the remembrance of the visit to fairyland had finally returned.
Or ancestral memory, perhaps, actual specific memory passed to child from parent as instinct was passed—but the catch was that, as an android, he didn’t have a parent.
He was parentless and raceless and a mockery of a man, created for a purpose he did not even know.
What purpose could the mutants have for him? What talent did he possess that made him useful to them?
That was the thing that hurt—that he should be used for some purpose which he did not know, that Ann should have some purpose she did not even guess.
The work of the mutants was more important than mere gadgetry, something greater than Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and synthetic carbohydrates. Their work was the rescue and the re-establishment of the race—the starting over again of a badly muddled humanity. It was the development of a world or worlds where war would not be merely outlawed, but impossible, where fear would never raise its head, where progress would have a different value than it had in mankind’s world today.
And into a program of this sort, where did Jay Vickers fit?
The mutants would take from the human race the deadly playthings and keep those playthings in trust until the child of Man was old enough to use them without hurting himself or injuring his neighbor. They would take from the three-year-old the twelve-year-old toy he was using dangerously and when he was twelve years old would give it back again, probably with refinements.
And the culture of the future, under mutant guidance, would be not merely a mechanistic culture, but a social and an economic and an artistic and spiritual culture as well. The mutants would take lopsided Man and mold him into balance and the years that were lost in the remolding would pay interest
in humanity in the years to come.
But that was speculation; that was getting nothing done. The thing that counted now was what he, Jay Vickers, android, meant to do about it. What was the role that he was to play?
Before he did anything about it, he needed information and he couldn’t get it here, lying on a corn-shuck mattress in the loft above the kitchen of a neo-pioneer home.
There was only one place where he could get that information.
He slid noiselessly out of bed and fumbled in the dark to find his ragged clothes.
XXXVI
THE house was dark, sleeping in the moonlight, with the tall shadows of the trees cast against its front. He stood in the shadow just outside the front gate and looked at it, remembering how he had seen it in the moonlight once before, when a road ran past the gate, but now there was no road. He recalled how the glow had fallen on the whiteness of the pillars and had turned them to ghostly beauty and of the words the two of them had said as they stood and watched the moonlight shattered on the pillars.
But that was dead and done. All that was left was the bitterness of knowing that he was not a man, but the imitation of a man.
HE opened the gate, went up the walk and climbed the steps that led to the porch. He crossed the porch and his footsteps rang so loudly in the stillness that he felt certain those in the house would hear him.
He found the bell and put his thumb upon it and pressed, then stood waiting, as he had waited once before. But this time there would be no Kathleen to come to the door to greet him.
He waited and a light sprang into life in the central hall and through the glass he saw a manlike figure fumbling at the door. The door came open and he stepped inside and the gleaming robot bowed a little stiffly and said, “Good evening, sir.”
“Hezekiah, I presume,” said Vickers.
“Hezekiah, sir,” the robot confirmed. “You met me this morning.”
“I went for a walk.”
“And now perhaps I could show you to your room.”
The robot turned and went up the winding staircase, with Vickers following him.
“It’s a nice night, sir,” the robot said.
“Very nice.”
“You have eaten, sir?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“I could bring you up a snack,” Hezekiah offered. “I believe there is some chicken left.”
“No,” said Vickers. “Thank you just the same.”
Hezekiah shoved open a door and turned on a light, then stepped aside making room for Vickers to go in.
“Perhaps,” said Hezekiah, “you Would like a nightcap.”
“That’s a good idea. Scotch, if you have it handy.”
“In just a moment, sir. You will find some pajamas in the third drawer from the top. They may be a little large, but probably you can manage.”
He found the pajamas and they were fairly new and very loud and they seemed quite a bit too big, but they were better than nothing and Vickers laid them out.
THE room was pleasant, with a huge bed covered by a white, stitched counterpane and the white curtains at the windows blew in on the night breeze.
He sat down in a chair to wait for Hezekiah and the drink and for the first time in many days he knew how tired he was. He’d have the drink and climb into bed and when morning came he’d go stomping down the stairs, looking for a showdown.
The door opened and he turned to take the drink from Hezekiah.
It wasn’t Hezekiah; it was Horton Flanders, in a crimson dressing robe fastened tight about his neck, and slippers on his feet that slapped against the floor as he crossed the room.
He sat down in another chair and looked at Vickers, with a half smile on his face.
“So you came back,” he said. “I came back to listen,” Vickers told him. “You can start talking right away.”
“That’s why I got up. As soon as Hezekiah told me you had arrived, I knew you’d want to talk.”
“I don’t want to talk,” said Vickers. “I want to listen.”
“Yes, certainly. I am the one to do the talking.”
“And not about the reservoirs of knowledge, of which you sermonize most beautifully, but specific practical, rather mundane things.”
“Like what?”
“Like why I am an android and why Ann Carter is, also. And whether there ever was a person named Kathleen Preston or is that just a story that was conditioned in my mind? And if there actually. was a Kathleen Preston, where is she now? And, finally, where do I fit in and now that I’m here what do you intend to do?”
FLANDERS nodded his head.
“A very admirable set of questions. You would pick the ones I can’t answer.”
“I came to tell you that the mutants are being hunted down and killed on that other world, that the gadget shops are being wrecked and burned, that the normal humans are finally fighting back. I came to warn you because I thought I was a mutant, too . . .”
“You are a mutant. I can as-, sure you, Vickers, you’re a very special kind of mutant.”
“A mutant android.”
“You are difficult,” said Flanders. “You let your bitterness—”
“Of course I’m bitter,” Vickers cut in. “Who wouldn’t be? All my life I believed I was a man and now I find I’m not.”
“You fool! You don’t know what you are!”
HEZEKIAH rapped on the door and came in with a tray. He set it on a table and Vickers saw that there were two glasses and some mix and an ice bucket and a fifth of liquor.
“Now,” said Flanders, happily, “perhaps we can talk some sense.
I don’t know what it is about the stuff, but put a drink into a man’s hand and you tend to civilize him.”
He reached into the pocket of his robe, brought out a pack of cigarettes and passed them to Vickers. Vickers took the pack and saw that his hand was shaking a little as he pulled out a smoke. He hadn’t realized until then just how keyed-up he was.
Flanders snapped the lighter and held out the flame. Vickers got his light.
“That’s good,” he said. “I ran out of smokes after the fourth day.”
He sat in the chair, smoking, thinking how good the tobacco tasted, feeling the satisfaction run along his nerves. He watched Hezekiah busy with the drinks.
“I eavesdropped this morning,” Vickers said. “I came here and Hezekiah let me in. I listened when you and some others were talking in the room.”
“I know you did,” said Flanders.
“How much of that was staged?”
“All of it,” said Flanders, blithely. “Every blessed word of it.”
“You wanted me to know I was an android?”
“We wanted you to know.”
“You set the mouse on me?”
“We had to do something to shake you out of your humdrum life. And the mouse served a special purpose.”
“It tattled on me.”
“Oh, exceedingly well. The mouse was a most efficient tattler.”
“The thing that really burns me,” Vickers said, “is that business about making Cliff wood think I had done you in.”
“We had to get you out of there and headed back to your childhood haunts.”
“How did you know where I’d go?”
FLANDERS said, “My friend, have you ever thought about the ability of hunch? I don’t mean the feeble hunch that is used on the racetrack to pick a winner or the hunch about whether it is going to rain or not, but the ability in the fullness of its concept. You might say it is the instinctive ability to assess the result of a given number of factors, to know, without actually thinking the matter out, what is about to happen.
“It’s almost like being able to peek into the future.”
“Yes,” said Vickers, “I have thought about it. A good deal in the last few days, as a matter of fact.”
“You have speculated on it?”
“To some extent. But what has . . .”
“Perhaps,” said Flanders,
“you have speculated that it might be a human ability that we never developed, that we scarcely knew was there and so never bothered with, or that it might be one of those abilities that it takes a long time to develop, a sort of an ace-in-the-hole ability for mankind’s use when he was ready for it or might have need of it.”
“I did think that, or at least some of it, but . . .”
“Now’s the time we need it,” Flanders interrupted again. “And that answers the question that you asked. We hunched you would go back.”
“At first I thought Crawford was the one, but he said he wasn’t.”
Flanders shook his head. “Crawford wouldn’t have done it. He needs you too badly. Your hunch on that one wasn’t working too hot.”
“No, I guess it wasn’t.”
“Your hunches don’t work,” said Flanders, “because you don’t give them a chance. You still have the world of reason to contend with. You put your reliance on the old machinelike reasoning that the human race has relied on since it left the caves. You figure out every angle and you balance it against every other angle and you add up and cancel out as if you were doing a problem in arithmetic. You never give hunch a chance. That’s the trouble with you.”
AND that was the trouble, Vickers thought. He’d had a hunch to spin the top on the porch of the Preston house. If he had done that, he’d have saved himself days of walking through the wilderness of this second world to get to this same spot. He’d had a hunch that he should have paid attention to Crawford’s note and not driven the Forever car. If he’d done that, he’d have saved himself a lot of trouble. And there had been the hunch, which he had finally obeyed, that he must get back the top—and that one had paid off.
“How much do you know?” asked Flanders.
“I don’t really know,” Vickers admitted. “I know there’s a mutant organization that had something to do with kicking the human race out of the rut you talked about, that night back in Cliff wood. And the organization has gone underground because its operations were getting too widespread and too significant to escape attention. You’ve got factories working, turning out the mutant gadgets you’re using to wreck the economy of the old world. I saw one of those. Tell me, do the robots run it or . . .” Flanders chuckled. “The robots run it. We just tell them what we want.”
The Complete Serials Page 51