The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  Within an immortal society, such a thing could never happen. An immortal society would be certain of total ability and total knowledge of its manpower.

  Take the ability to tap the knowledge of the stars, take inherent memory, the technical knowledge that made everlasting merchandise and add immortality.

  That was the formula—of what? Of the ultimate in life? Of the pinnacle of intellect? Of godhood itself?

  Go back a hundred thousand years. Consider the creature, Man. Give him fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, domesticated animals and plants, plus tribal organization and the first, faint dawning concept of Man as the lord of Earth. Take that formula and what did you have?

  The beginning of civilization, the foundation of a human culture.

  The formula of the mutants, he knew, was simply another step upward as the fire-wheel-dog formula of a hundred thousand years before had been an earlier forward step.

  The mutant formula was not the end result of human effort nor of human intellect and knowledge; it was but a step. Within the human mind still dwelled the possibility of even greater steps, but what the concepts of those steps might be was as inconceivable to him as the time structure of the following worlds would have been to the man who discovered fire or tamed the dog.

  WE still are savages, he thought. We _still crouch within our cave, staring out beyond the smoky fire that guards the entrance of our cave against the illimitable darkness that lies upon the world.

  Someday we’ll plumb that darkness, but not yet.

  Immortality would be a tool that might help us plumb that darkness and that is all it is, a simple, ordinary tool.

  What was the darkness out beyond the cave’s mouth?

  Man’s ignorance of what he was or why he was or how he came to be and what his purpose and his end. The old, eternal questions.

  Perhaps with the tool of immortality Man could track down these questions, could gain an understanding of the orderly progression and the awful logic which fashioned and moved the Universe of matter and of energy.

  The next step might be a spiritual one, the finding and understanding of a divine pattern that was law unto the entire Universe. Might Man find at last, in all humility, a universal God—the Deity that men now worshiped with the faintness of human understanding and the strength of human faith? Would Man find at last the concept of divinity that would fill, without question and without quibble, Man’s terrible need of faith, so clear and unmistakable that there could be no question and no doubt; a concept of goodness and of love with which Man could so identify himself that there would then be no need of faith, but faith replaced with knowing and an everlasting sureness?

  And if Man outlawed death, he thought, if the doorway of death is closed against the final revelation and the resurrection, then surely Man must find such a concept or wander forever amid the galaxies a lost and crying thing.

  “Hezekiah,” said Jay Vickers, “you are sure?”

  “Of what, sir?”

  “About the Prestons. You are sure there are none?”

  “Positive, sir. None whatever.”

  “There was a Kathleen Preston,” Vickers said. “I am sure there was.”

  But how could he be so sure?

  For one thing, he remembered her. For another, Flanders said there was no such a person.

  But his memory could be conditioned and so could Flanders’.

  Kathleen Preston could be no more than an emotional factor designed to bind him to this house, a keyed-in response that would not let him forget, no matter where he went or what he might become, this house and the ties it held for him.

  “Hezekiah, who is Horton Flanders?” Vickers asked.

  “Horton Flanders,” said the robot, “is an android, just the same as you.”

  —CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

  CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH

  Vickers was safe on the other world, but he had to return for Ann—or she'd be slain by those who tried to fight evolution!

  SYNOPSIS

  WORLD industry is fighting for its life against a group of mutants who are attempting to destroy the world’s economic system as the first step in building a new and better world.

  The world, in this year of 1977, is in a mess. The cold war still goes on. The people of the world have lived so long under tension that tension has become the normal way of life.

  An indication of this tension is the rapid spread of the Pretentionist clubs, whose members seek security by pretending that they are living in the past.

  The mutants’ attack on world industry has taken the form of placing on the market everlasting cars, razor blades, cigarette lighters and light bulbs, thus destroying one industry after another.

  Jay Vickers, a writer, is introduced to George Crawford by his agent, Ann Carter. Crawford is head of a coalition of industrial interests which have organized to fight the mutant menace. Crawford wants Vickers to write a book exposing the mutant plot and Vickers refuses.

  Vickers and Ann are in love, but Vickers does not realize it. He is obsessed with the memory of a walk with his lost love, Kathleen Preston, 20 years ago, in what seemed to be an enchanted valley.

  An old eccentric neighbor, Horton Flanders, hints that there is a new factor in the world which is keeping the world from war and that this same factor, in the last 80 years, has nudged the human race into a technological gallop.

  When Flanders disappears, the village suspects Vickers of having done away with him. Eb, the garageman, warns Vickers that a lynch mob is forming and loans him a new Forever car, one of the mutant products, to use to make a getaway.

  Fleeing, Vickers returns to the country where he had spent his childhood and fallen in love with Kathleen Preston. There, in the now abandoned house where he had lived as a boy, he finds a top, a lost childhood toy. He remembers a fact which until then he had utterly forgotten—as a boy of eight, he had used the top to go into what had seemed to be fairyland.

  He is contacted by Crawford, who says that Vickers and Ann Carter are latent mutants. He tells Vickers that the normal humans have a secret weapon they will not hesitate to use against the mutants, pleads with Vickers to aid him in enabling the two groups to reach an understanding short of war.

  With Crawford gone, Vickers tries to phone Ann in New York, intending to warn her to get out of Crawford’s reach, but her telephone does not answer. Vickers starts back to New York, but when he stops at a town, his car is wrecked by a mob. Escaping, Vickers finds a newspaper, which reveals that mutant shops are being wrecked, mutants are being hunted down.

  Vickers risks his life to go back to his wrecked car and retrieve the top he has found. Spotted, he eludes his pursuers and takes temporary refuge in the back room of a hardware store.

  In a frantic bid to escape, he uses the top which once before had taken him into “fairyland,” although he knows that it could not have been fairyland, but another world co-existing with our own.

  The top carries him back to a wilderness, with no sign of Man anywhere. Fearing that he is trapped in a primitive, empty world, he sets out for the region where his and Kathleen’s homes were located in the normal world, feeling that, if anywhere, he will find humans there.

  After days of travel on foot through the wilderness, he stumbles on what apparently is a factory operated entirely by robots and is convinced that mutants are operating it to manufacture their everlasting products.

  He finds the home of Kathleen Preston duplicated in the co-existent world, but Kathleen is not there. Led into a waiting room by a robot, he overhears a conversation and learns that he is not a human being, but an android, a human manufactured by the mutants, and so is Ann Carter. One of the voice he recognizes as that of Horton Flanders.

  Enraged and chagrined, Vickers leaves the house and wanders into the woods. There he meets a man by the name of Asa Andrews, a colonist who has been brought to this place, which he calls Earth No. 2. The mutants, Andrews explains, are bringing the economically and socially oppressed members of the
human race there to give them a new start in life. There are an infinite number of co-existing earths traveling in a ring around the Sun, so that with the way between the earths now opened by the mutants, there is no end to living space and opportunity for the human race.

  Vickers tries to figure out the setup. The mutants apparently are using Earth No. 2 as an operating base. Because their numbers are small, they employ robots and androids to carry on their campaign against humanity. He is surprised by the many things which he actually seems to know, almost as if he had a previous memory of the situation.

  He goes back to the Preston house and there demands an explanation of Flanders. The mind and personality of the actual Vickers, Flanders explains, have been transferred to the android Vickers, so that, when his mind is returned to the original Jay Vickers, he will be able to transmit to his children, through the inherent memory factor, all the advantages of full-blown mutation.

  Flanders says one of the factors of mutancy which Vickers carries is a hunch ability, badly needed to win the fight for a mutant world. The hunch ability, Flanders explains, is the development of a hidden human trait which does away with the necessity of slow, tortuous human reasoning.

  He tells Vickers that his job is to stop Crawford, that he is the only man who can do it. Vickers is reluctant to fall in with the mutant campaign. Flanders dangles a reward in front of Vickers: When Crawford and his gang have been stopped, Vickers and Kathleen will be returned to the age of 18. It will be as if all the other years had never been. They will be 18 and in love and they may even hope for immortality, since the mutants are close to the secret of eternal life.

  With Flanders gone, Vickers asks a robot, Hezekiah, to bring him the record of his and Kathleen’s families. He finds that his mother and father have been placed in suspended animation to await the day when the mutants have established a new human society and immortality is available. Vickers, who had been on the verge of walking out on Flanders and the mutants, now realizes that he has no choice but to work for the mutants, thus to keep the faith that his parents held in the mutant cause.

  Hezekiah says, however, that there is no record of any Preston family. Vickers wonders if Kathleen may be no more than an emotional trap introduced into his android brain to keep him tied to the cause of mutation “Hezekiah,” he asks, “who is Horton Flanders?”

  “Horton Flanders,” says the robot, “is an android, just the same as you.”

  XXXVII

  SO Vickers was supposed to stop Crawford. But first he had to figure out the angles.

  There was the might of industry, not one industry alone, but the might of all the industry in the entire world. There was the fact that Crawford and industry had declared open war upon the mutants. And there was the matter of the secret weapon.

  “Desperation and a secret weapon,” Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room. “But the secret weapon,” he had added, “isn’t good enough.”

  First of all, Vickers had to know what the secret Weapon was. Until he knew that, there would be no point in making any plans.

  He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and sorted out the facts and had a look at them. Then he juggled them a bit, balancing the strength of normal human against the strength of mutant. There were many places where they canceled one another and there were other instances where they did not.

  He got exactly nowhere.

  “And of course I won’t,” he said. “This is the old awkward normal human way of doing. This is reasoning.””

  Hunch was the thing.

  And how to do the hunching?

  He swept the factors from his mind and lay upon the bed, staring at the darkness where the ceiling was, and did not try to think.

  He could feel the factors bumping in his brain, bouncing together, then fleeing from each other, but he ignored and shunned them.

  An idea came: War.

  He thought about it and it grew and gripped him.

  War, but a different kind of war than the world had ever known. What was that phrase from the old history of the beginning of World War II? A phony war. And yet not a phony war.

  It was a disturbing thing to think about something you couldn’t place—to have a hunch—that was it, a hunch gnawing at you and not knowing what it was.

  He tried to think about it and it retreated from him and he stopped thinking.

  Another idea came: Poverty.

  And poverty was somehow tied up with war and he sensed the two ideas, circling like coyotes around the campfire that was himself, snarling and growling at one another in the darkness beyond the flame of his understanding.

  He tried to banish them into the darkness and they would not banish.

  AFTER a time, he grew accustomed to them and it seemed that the campfire flickered lower and the coyote-ideas did not run so fast nor snap so viciously.

  There was another factor, said his sleepy mind. The mutants were short on manpower. That’s why they had the robots and the androids.

  There would be ways you could get around a manpower shortage. You could take one life and split it into many lives. You could take one mutant life and you could spread it thin, stretch it out and make it last longer and go further. In the economy of manpower, you could do many things if you just knew how.

  The coyotes were circling more slowly now and the fire was growing dimmer and I’ll stop you, Crawford, I’ll get the answer and I’ll stop you cold and I love you, Ann, and—

  Then, not knowing he had slept, he woke and sat upright in the bed.

  He knew!

  SHIVERING in the chill of summer dawn, he swung his legs from beneath the covers and felt the cold of the floor against his bare soles.

  Vickers ran to the door and yanked it open and came out into the landing. The stairway spiraled down into the hall below him.

  “Flanders!” he shouted. “Where are you, Flanders?”

  Hezekiah appeared from somewhere and began to climb the stairs, calling, “What is the matter, sir? Is there something you want?”

  “I want Horton Flanders!” Another door opened and Flanders stood there, bony ankles showing beneath his pajama bottom, sparse hair standing almost erect.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, tongue still thick with sleep. “What’s all this racket about?” Vickers strode across the hall and grabbed him by the shoulders and demanded, “How many of us are there, Flanders? How many ways was Jay Vickers’ life divided?”

  “If you’ll stop shaking me—”

  “I will when you tell me the truth!”

  “Oh, gladly,” Flanders said.

  “There are three of us—you and I and . . .”

  “You?”

  “Certainly? Why not?”

  “But you’re older than I.”

  “You can do a great deal with synthetic flesh,” said Flanders. “You should know that. I don’t see why you’re surprised.”

  And he wasn’t, Vickers suddenly realized. It was as if he had been aware of it all his life.

  “The third one?” he asked. “You said there are three of us.” Flanders shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would—create complications for you. Impair your efficiency and thus your value.”

  “By knowing who the other third of Jay Vickers is?”

  “Decidedly. Not only can I not tell you who it is, but I can’t even explain why I can’t, because it would give away what I must conceal from you.”

  A frightful suspicion came into Vickers’ mind. He stepped away from Flanders and his back touched the doorway to his own room and he leaned against it, shaking.

  “I know,” he said. “I know who the other is.”

  Flanders shrugged. “Perhaps. You won’t get confirmation or denial from me.”

  Vickers turned and faced him. “I have it now, everything you hoped for. I know the secret weapon and the answer to it. You said I should stop Crawford. I can.”

  “You’re
sure of that?”

  “Completely sure,” said Vickers, “but what the hell’s the use?”

  He went into his room and shut the door.

  XXXVIII

  WHERE had been a moment when he had seen his course straight and clear before him—the realization that Kathleen Preston might have been no more than a conditioned figment, that for years the implanted memory of the walk in the enchanted valley had blinded him to his love for Ann Carter and the love he now was sure she felt for him, disguised behind their silly bitter quarreling.

  Then had come the knowledge that his parents slept away the years in suspended animation, waiting for the coming of that world of peace to which they had given so much—waiting, too, for the immortality which alone could revitalize their aged bodies.

  And he had not been able to turn his back upon them.

  Perhaps, he told himself, it was just as well, for now there was this other factor—making more than one life out of a single individual.

  It was a sensible way to do things, possibly a valid method, for the mutants needed manpower. When you needed manpower, you did the best you could with what you had at hand. You placed in the hands of robots the work that could be left to robots, and you took men and women and out of each of those lives you made several, housing the living fractions in the bodies of your androids.

  Ann Carter was not another person, at all, but a part of him. For three androids had been given the spark of life from the person who had been Jay Vickers—he and Horton Flanders and Ann Carter. In time, the three of them would let their life flow back again into the body of the original Jay Vickers. And when that happened, he wondered, which one of them would continue as Jay Vickers? Or would none of them? Would it be a sentence of death for all three of them and a continuation of the consciousness that Jay Vickers himself had known? Or would the three of them be mingled, so that the resurrected Jay Vickers would be a Flanders-Carter-Vickers personality?

  HE shook his head. There was no way of knowing.