The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  The coffee maker was going full blast now. Enoch threw the paper down and strode to the stove to snatch it off. From the cupboard he got a cup and went to the table with it.

  But before he began to eat, he went back to the desk and, opening a drawer, got out his chart and spread it on the table. Once again he wondered just how valid it might be. In certain parts of it, at times, it seemed to make a certain sort of sense.

  He had based it on the Mizar theory of statistics and had been forced, because of the nature of his subject, to shift some of the factors, to substitute some values. He wondered now, for the thousandth time, if he had made an error somewhere. Had his shifting and substitution destroyed the validity of the system? And if so, how could he correct the errors to restore validity?

  Here the factors were, he thought: the birth rate and the total population of the Earth, the death rate, the values of currencies, the spread of living costs, attendance of places of worship, medical advances, technological developments, industrial indices, the labor market, world trade trends—and many others, including some that at first glance might not seem too relevant: the auction price of art objects, vacation preferences and movements, the speed of transportation, the incidence of insanity.

  The statistical method developed by the mathematicians of Mizar, he knew, would work anywhere, on anything, if applied correctly. But he had been forced °to twist it in translating an alien planet’s situation to fit the situation here on Earth. And in consequence of that twisting, did it still apply?

  He shuddered as he looked at it. For if he’d made no mistake, if he’d handled everything correctly, if his translations had done no violence to the concept, then the Earth was headed straight for another major war.

  HE LET go the corners of the chart. It rolled itself back into a cylinder.

  He reached for one of the fruits the Sirrah being had brought him and bit into it. He rolled it on his tongue, savoring the delicacy of the taste. It was as good as that strange, bird-like being had guaranteed it would be.

  There had been a time, he remembered, when he had held some hope that the chart based on the Mizar theory might show, if not a way to end all war, at least a way to keep the peace. But the chart had never given any hint of the road to peace. Inexorably, relentlessly, it had led the way to war.

  How many other wars, he wondered, could the people of the Earth endure?

  No man could say, of course. But it might be just one more. For the weapons that would be used in the coming conflict had not as yet been measured. There was no man who could come close to actually estimating the results these weapons would produce.

  War had been bad enough when men faced one another with their weapons in their hands, but in any present war great payloads of destruction would go hurtling through the skies to engulf whole cities—aimed not at military concentrations, but at total populations.

  He reached out his hand for the chart again, then pulled it back. There was no further need of looking at it. He knew it all by heart. There was no hope in it. He might study it and puzzle over it until the crack of doom and it would not change a whit. There was no hope at all. The world was thundering once again, in a blind red haze of fury and of helplessness, down the road to war.

  He went on with his eating and the fruit was even better than it had been at first bite. Next time, the being had said, I will bring you more. But it might be a long time before he came again, and he might never come. There were many of them who passed through only once, although there were a few who showed up every week or so—old, regular travelers who had become close friends.

  And there had been, he recalled, that little group of Hazers who, years ago, had made arrangements for extra long stopovers at the station so they could sit around this very table and talk the hours away, arriving laden with hampers and with baskets of things to eat and drink, as if it were a picnic they had stopped for.

  But finally they had stopped their coming. It had been years since he’d seen any one of them. He regretted it, for they’d been the best of companions.

  He drank an extra cup of coffee, sitting idly in the chair, thinking about those good old days when the band of Hazers came.

  X

  HIS EARS caught the faint rustling and he glanced quickly up to see her sitting on the sofa, dressed in the demure hoop skirts of the 1860s.

  “Mary!” he cried, surprised, rising to his feet.

  She was smiling at him in her very special way and she was beautiful, he thought, as no other woman ever had been beautiful.

  “Mary,” he said, “it’s so nice to have you here.”

  And now, leaning on the mantlepiece, dressed in Union blue, with his belted sabre and his full black mustache, was another of his friends.

  “Hello, Enoch,” David Ransome said. “I hope we don’t intrude.”

  “Never,” Enoch told him. “How can two friends intrude?”

  He stood beside the table and the past was with him, the good and restful past, the rose-scented and unhaunted past that had never left him.

  Somewhere in the distance was the sound of fife and drum and the jangle of the battle harness as the boys marched off to war, with the colonel glorious in his full dress uniform upon the great black stallion, and the regimental flags snapping in the stiff June breeze.

  He walked across the room and over to the sofa. He made a little bow to Mary.

  “With your permission, ma’am,” he said.

  “Please do,” she said. “If you should happen to be busy we would understand . . .”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I was hoping you would come.”

  He sat down on the sofa, not too close to her. Her hands were folded very primly in her lap. He wanted to reach out and take her hands in his and hold them for a moment, but he knew he couldn’t.

  For she wasn’t really there.

  “IT’S BEEN almost a week,” said Mary, “since I’ve seen you. How is your work going, Enoch?”

  He shook his head. “I still have all the problems. The watchers still are out there. And the chart says war.”

  David left the mantle and came across the room. He sat down in a chair and arranged his sabre.

  “War, the way they fight it these days,” he declared, “would be a sorry business. Not the way we fought it, Enoch.”

  “No,” said Enoch. “Not the way we fought it. A war would be bad enough, but there is something worse. If Earth fights another war, our people will be barred for many centuries from the confraternity of space.”

  “Maybe that’s not so bad,” said David. “We may not be ready to join the ones in space.”

  “Perhaps not,” Enoch admitted. “I rather doubt we are. But we could be some day. And that day would be shoved far into the future if we fight another war. You have to make some pretense of being civilized to join those other races.”

  “Maybe,” Mary said, “they might never know. About a war, I mean. They go no place but this station.”

  Enoch shook his head. “They would know. I think they’re watching us. Anyhow, they would read the papers.”

  “The papers you subscribe to?”

  “I save them for Ulysses. That pile over in the corner. He takes them back to Galactic Central every time he comes. He’s very interested in Earth, you know, from the years he spent here. And from Galactic Central, once he’s read them, I have a hunch the papers travel to the corners of the galaxy.”

  “Can you imagine,” David asked, “what the promotion departments of those newspapers might have to say about it if they only knew their depth of circulation?”

  Enoch grinned at the thought.

  “There’s that paper down in Georgia,” David said, “that covers Dixie like the dew. They’d have to think of something that goes with galaxy.”

  “Glove,” said Mary, quickly. “Covers the galaxy like a glove. What do you think of that?”

  “Excellent,” said David.

  “POOR ENOCH,” Mary said, contrite. “Here we make our
jokes and Enoch has his problems.”

  “Not mine to solve, of course,” Enoch told her. “I’m just worried by them. All I have to do is stay inside the station and there are no problems. Once you close the door here, the problems of the world are securely locked outside.”

  “But you can’t do that.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Enoch.

  “I think you may be right,” said David, “in thinking that these other races may be watching us. With an eye, perhaps, to some day inviting the human race to join them. Otherwise, why would they have wanted to set up a station here on Earth?”

  “They’re expanding the network all the time,” said Enoch. “They needed a station in this solar system to carry out their extension into this spiral arm.”

  “Yes, that’s true enough,” said David, “but it need not have been the Earth. They could have built a station out on Mars and used an alien for a keeper and still have served their purpose.”

  “I’ve often thought of that,” said Mary. “They wanted a station on the Earth and an Earthman as its keeper. There must be a reason for it.”

  “I had hoped there was,” Enoch told her. “But I’m afraid they came too soon. It’s too early for the human race. We aren’t grown up. We still are juveniles.”

  “It’s a shame,” said Mary. “We’d have so much to learn. They know so much more than we. Their concept of religion, for example.”

  “I don’t know,” said Enoch, “whether it’s actually a religion. It seems to have few of the trappings we associate with religion. And it is not based on faith. It doesn’t have to be. It is based on knowledge. These people know, you see.”

  “But don’t you think,” asked David, “that the human race may sense this? They don’t know it, but they sense it. And are reaching out to touch it. They haven’t got the knowledge, so they must do the best they can with faith. And that faith goes back a far way, perhaps deep into the prehistoric days.”

  “I suppose so,” Enoch said. “But it actually wasn’t the spiritual force I was thinking of. There are all the other things, the material things, the methods, the philosophies that the human race could use. Name almost any branch of science and there is something there for us—more than what we have.”

  But his mind went back to that strange business of the spiritual force and the even stranger machine which had been built eons ago, by means of which the galactic people were able to establish contact with the force. There was a name for that machine, but there was no word in the English language which closely approximated it.

  Talisman was the closest. But Talisman was too crude a word—although that had been the word that Ulysses had used when, some years ago, they had talked of it.

  THERE WERE so many things, so many concepts, he thought, out in the galaxy which could not be adequately expressed in any tongue on Earth. The Talisman was more than a talisman and the machine which had been given the name was more than a mere machine. Involved in it, as well as certain mechanical concepts, was a psychic concept, perhaps some sort of psychic energy that was unknown on Earth. That and a great deal more. He had read some of the literature on the spiritual force and on the Talisman and had realized, he remembered, in the reading of it, how far short he fell—how far short the human race must fall—in an understanding of it.

  The Talisman could be operated only by certain beings with certain types of minds and something else besides (could it be, he wondered, with certain kinds of souls?) Sensitives was the word he had used in his mental translation of the term for these kinds of people. But once again he could not be sure if the word came close to fitting. The Talisman was placed in the custody of the most capable, or the most efficient, or the most devoted (whichever it might be) of the galactic sensitives, who carried it from star to star in a sort of eternal progression. And on each planet the people came to make personal and individual contact with the spiritual force through the intervention and the agency of the Talisman and its custodian.

  He found that he was shivering at the thought of it—the pure ecstasy of reaching out and touching the spirituality that flooded through the galaxy and, undoubtedly, through the universe. The assurance would be there that life had a special place in the great scheme of existence—that one, no matter how small, how feeble, how insignificant, still did count for something in the vast sweep of space and time.

  “What is the trouble, Enoch?” Mary asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  David said, “You were talking about what we could find in the galaxy. There was, for one thing, that strange sort of math. You were telling us of it once—”

  “The Arcturus math, you mean,” said Enoch. “I know little more than when I told you of it. It is too involved. It is based on behavior symbolism.”

  There was some doubt, he told himself, that you could even call it math. It was something that the scientists of Earth, no doubt, could use to make possible the engineering of the social sciences as logically and as efficiently as the common brand of math had been used to build the gadgets of the Earth.

  “And the biology of that race out in Andromeda,” Mary said. “The ones who colonized all those crazy planets.”

  “Yes, I know. But Earth would have to mature a bit in its intellectual and emotional outlook before we’d venture to use it as the Andromedans did. Still, I suppose that it would have its applications.”

  HE SHUDDERED inwardly as he thought of how the Andromedans used it. And that, he knew, was proof that he still was a man of Earth, kin to all the bias and the prejudice and the shibboleths of the human mind. For what the Andromedans had done was only common sense. If you cannot colonize a planet in your present shape, why, then you change your shape. You make yourself into the sort of being that can live upon the planet and then you take it over in that alien shape into which you have changed yourself. If you need to be a worm, then you become a worm. Or an insect. Or a shellfish, or whatever it may take. And you change not your body only, but your mind as well, into the kind of mind that will be necessary to live upon that planet.

  “There are all the drugs,” said Mary, “and the medicines. The medical knowledge that could apply to Earth. There was that little package Galactic Central sent you.”

  “A packet of drugs,” said Enoch, “that could cure almost every ill on Earth. That, perhaps, hurts me most of all. To know they’re up there in the cupboard, actually on this planet, where so many people need them.”

  “You could mail out samples,” David said, “to medical associations or to some drug concern.”

  Enoch shook his head. “I thought of that, but I have the galaxy to consider. I have an obligation to Galactic Central. They have taken great precautions that the station not be known, I cannot wreck their plans. For when you think of it, Galactic Central and the work it’s doing is more important than the Earth.”

  “Divided loyalties,” said David, with slight mockery in his tone.

  “That is it, exactly. There had been a time, many years ago, when I thought of writing papers for some of the scientific journals. Not the medical journals, naturally, for I know nothing about medicine. The drugs are there, of course, lying on the shelf, with directions for their use, but they are merely so many pills or powders or ointments, or whatever they may be. But there were other things I’d learned. Not too much about them, naturally, but at least some hints in some new directions. Enough that someone could pick them up and go on from there. Someone who might know what to do with them.”

  “But, look here,” David said, “that wouldn’t have worked out. You have no technical nor research background, no educational record. You’re not tied up with any school or college. The journals just don’t publish you unless you can prove yourself.”

  “I REALIZE that, of course, That’s why I never wrote the papers. I knew there was no use. You can’t blame the journals. They must be responsible. Their pages aren’t open to just anyone. And even if they had viewed the papers with enough respect to want to publish th
em, they would have had to find out who I was. And that would have led straight back to the station.”

  “Even so,” said David, “there’d be little you actually could tell them. What I mean is that generally you haven’t got enough to go on. So much of this galactic knowledge is off the beaten track.”

  “I know,” said Enoch. “The mental engineering of Mankalinen III, for one thing. If the Earth could know of that, our people undoubtedly could find a clue to the treatment of the neurotic and the mentally disturbed. We could empty all the institutions and we could tear them down or use them for something else. There’d be no need of them. But no one other than the people out on Mankalinen III could ever tell us of it. I only know they are noted for their mental engineering, but that is all I know. I haven’t the faintest inkling of what it’s all about. It’s something that you’d have to get from the people out there.”

  “What you are really talking of,” said Mary, “are all the nameless sciences—the ones that no human has ever thought about.”

  “Like us, perhaps,” said David.

  “David!” Mary cried.

  “There is no sense,” said David, angrily, “in pretending we are people.”

  “But you are,” said Enoch tensely. “You are people to me. You are the only people that I have. What is the matter, David?

  “I think,” said David, “that the time has come to say what we really are. We are illusion. We are created and called up. We exist only for one purpose, to come and talk with you, to fill in for the real people that you cannot have.”

  “Mary,” Enoch cried, “you don’t think that way, too! You can’t think that way!”

  He reached out his arms to her and then he let them drop—terrified at the realization of what he’d been about to do. It was the first time he’d ever tried to touch her.