City (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by Clifford D. Simak

  ‘I brought something,’ said Sara. ‘One of Ballentree’s latest masterpieces. It will cut your age in half.’

  He grunted. ‘Wonder Ballentree hasn’t killed off half Geneva, the drinks that he cooks up.’

  ‘This one is really good.’

  It was. It went down smooth and it had a strange, half metallic, half ecstatic taste.

  Webster pulled another chair close to Sara’s, sat down and looked at her.

  ‘You have such a nice place here,’ said Sara. ‘Randall did it, didn’t he?’

  Webster nodded. ‘He had more fun than a circus, I had to beat him off with a club. And those robots of his! They’re crazier than he is.’

  ‘But he does wonderful things. He did a Martian room for Quentin and it’s simply unworldly.’

  ‘I know,’ said Webster. ‘Was set on a deep-space one for here. Said it would be just the place to sit and think. Got sore at me when I wouldn’t let him do it.’

  He rubbed the back of his left hand with his right thumb, staring off at the blue haze above the ocean. Sara leaned forward, pulled his thumb away.

  ‘You still have the warts,’ she said.

  He grinned. ‘Yes. Could have had them taken off, but never got around to it. Too busy, I guess. Part of me by now.’

  She released the thumb and he went back to rubbing the warts absent-mindedly.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ she said. ‘Haven’t seen you around much. How is the book coming?’

  ‘Ready to write,’ said Webster. ‘Outlining it by chapters now. Checked on the last thing to-day. Have to make sure, you know. Place way down under the old Solar Administration Building. Some sort of a defence set-up. Control room. You push a lever and—’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Webster. ‘Something effective, I suppose. Should try to find out, but can’t find the heart to do it. Been digging around in too much dust these last twenty years to face any more.’

  ‘You sound discouraged, Jon. Tired. You shouldn’t get tired. There’s no reason for it. You should get around. Have another drink?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, Sara, thanks. Not in the mood, I guess. I’m afraid, Sara – afraid.’

  ‘Afraid?’

  ‘This room,’ said Webster. ‘Illusion. Mirrors that give an illusion of distance. Fans that blow the air through a salt spray, pumps that stir up the waves. A synthetic sun. And if I don’t like the sun, all I have to do is snap a switch and I have a moon.’

  ‘Illusion,’ said Sara.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Webster. ‘That is all we have. No real work, no real job. Nothing that we’re working for, no place we’re going. I’ve worked for twenty years and I’ll write a book and not a soul will read it. All they’d have to do would be spend the time to read it, but they won’t take the time. They won’t care. All they’d have to do would be come and ask me for a copy – and if they didn’t want to do that I’d be so glad someone was going to read it that I’d take it to them. But no one will. It will go on the shelves with all the other books that have been written. And what do I get out of it? Wait . . . I’ll tell you. Twenty years of work, twenty years of fooling myself, twenty years of sanity.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sara softly. ‘I know, Jon. The last three paintings—’

  He looked up quickly. ‘But, Sara—’

  She shook her head. ‘No, Jon. No one wanted them. They’re out of style. Naturalistic stuff is passé. Impressionalism now.’ Daubs—’

  ‘We are too rich,’ said Webster. ‘We have too much. Everything was left for us – everything and nothing. When Mankind went out to Jupiter the few that were left behind inherited the Earth and it was too big for them. They couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t manage it. They thought they owned it, but they were the ones that were owned. Owned and dominated and awed by the things that had gone before.’ She reached out a hand and touched his arm.

  ‘Poor Jon,’ she said.

  ‘We can’t flinch away from it,’ he said. ‘Some day some of us must face the truth, must start over again – from scratch.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Yes, what is it, Sara?’

  ‘I came here to say good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye?’

  ‘I’m going to take the Sleep.’

  He came to his feet, swiftly, horrified. ‘No, Sara!’

  She laughed and the laugh was strained. ‘Why don’t you come with me, Jon? A few hundred years. Maybe it will all be different when we awake.’

  ‘Just because no one wants your canvases. Just because—’

  ‘Because of what you said just a while ago. Illusion, Jon. I knew it, felt it, but I couldn’t think it out.’

  ‘But the Sleep is illusion, too.’

  ‘I know. But you don’t know it’s illusion.’ You think it’s real. You have no inhibitions and you have no fears except the fears that are planned deliberately. It’s natural, Jon – more natural than life. I went up to the Temple and it was all explained to me.’

  ‘And when you awake?’

  ‘You’re adjusted. Adjusted to whatever life is like in whatever era you awake. Almost as if you belonged, even from the first. And it might be better. Who knows? It might be better.’

  ‘It won’t be,’ Jon told her grimly. ‘Until, or unless, someone does something about it. And a people that run to the Sleep to hide are not going to bestir themselves.’

  She shrank back in the chair and suddenly he felt ashamed.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sara. I didn’t mean you. Nor any one person. Just the lot of us.’

  The palms whispered harshly, fronds rasping. Little pools of water, left by the surging tide, sparkled in the sun.

  ‘I won’t try to dissuade you,’ Webster said. ‘You’ve thought it out, you know what it is you want.’

  It hadn’t always been like that with the human race, he thought. There would have been a day, a thousand years ago, when a man would have argued about a thing like this. But Juwainism had ended all the petty quarrels. Juwainism had ended a lot of things.

  ‘I’ve always thought,’ Sara told him softly, ‘if we could have stayed together—’

  He made a gesture of impatience. ‘It’s just another thing we’ve lost, another thing that the human race let loose. Come to think it over, we lost a lot of things. Family ties and business, work and purpose.’

  He turned to face her squarely. ‘If you want to come back, Sara—’

  She shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t work, Jon. It’s been too many years.’

  He nodded. There was no use denying it.

  She rose and held out her hand. ‘If you ever decide to take the Sleep, find out my date. I’ll have them reserve a place right next to me.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever shall,’ he told her.

  ‘All right, then. Good-bye, Jon.’

  ‘Wait a second, Sara. You haven’t said a word about our son. I used to see him often, but—’

  She laughed brightly. ‘Tom’s almost a grown man now, Jon. And it’s the strangest thing. He—’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for so long,’ Webster said again.

  ‘No wonder. He’s scarcely in the city. It’s his hobby. Something he inherited from you, I guess. Pioneering in a way. I don’t know what else you’d call it.’

  ‘You mean some new research. Something unusual.’

  ‘Unusual, yes, but not research. Just goes out in the woods and lives by himself. He and a few of his friends. A bag of salt, a bow and arrows— Yes, it’s queer,’ Sara admitted, ‘but he has a lot of fun. Claims he’s learning something. And he does look healthy. Like a wolf. Strong and lean and a look about his eyes.’

  She swung around and moved away.

  ‘I’ll see you to the door,’ said Webster.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I’d rather that you wouldn’t.’

  ‘You’re forgetting the jug.’

  ‘You keep it, Jon. I won’t need it where I’m going.’

  Webster put on t
he plastic ‘thinking cap’, snapped the button of the writer on his desk.

  Chapter Twenty-six, he thought and the writer clicked and chuckled and wrote ‘Chapter XXVI’.

  For a moment Webster held his mind clear, assembling his data, arranging his outline, then he began again. The writer clicked and gurgled, hummed into steady work:

  The machines ran on, tended by the robots as they had been before, producing all the things they had produced before.

  And the robots worked as they knew it was their right to work, their right and duty, doing the things they had been made to do.

  The machines went on and the robots went on, producing wealth as if there were men to use it, as if there were millions of men instead of a bare five thousand.

  And the five thousand who had stayed behind or who had been left behind suddenly found themselves the masters of a world that had been geared to the millions, found themselves possessed of the wealth and services that only months before had been the wealth and services that had been due the millions.

  There was no government, but there was no need of government, for all the crimes and abuses that government had held in check were as effectively held in check by the sudden wealth the five thousand had inherited. No man will steal when he can pick up what he wants without the bother of thievery. No man will contest with his neighbour over real estate when the entire world is real estate for the simple taking. Property rights almost overnight became a phrase that had no meaning in a world where there was more than enough for all.

  Crimes of violence long before had been virtually eliminated from human society and with the economic pressure eased to a point where property rights ceased to be a point of friction, there was no need of government. No need, in fact, of many of the encumbrances of custom and convenience which man had carried forward from the beginnings of commerce. There was no need of currency, for exchange had no meaning in a world where to get a thing one need but ask for it or take it.

  Relieved of economic pressure, the social pressures lessened, too. A man no longer found it necessary to conform to the standards and the acts of custom which had played so large a part in the post-Jovian world as an indication of commercial character.

  Religion, which had been losing ground for centuries, entirely disappeared. The family unit, held together by tradition and by the economic necessity of a provider and protector, fell apart. Men and women lived together as they wished, parted when they wished. For there was no economic reason, no social reason why they shouldn’t.

  Webster cleared his mind and the machine purred softly at him. He put up his hands, took off the cap, re-read the last paragraph of the outline.

  There, he thought, there is the root of it. If the families had stayed together. If Sara and I stayed together.

  He rubbed the warts on the back of his hand, wondering: Wonder if Tom goes by my name or hers. Usually they take their mother’s name. I know I did at first until my mother asked me to change it. Said it would please my father and she didn’t mind. Said he was proud of the name he bore and I was his only child. And she had others.

  If only we had stayed together. Then there’d be something worth living for. If we’d stayed together, Sara wouldn’t be taking the Sleep, wouldn’t be lying in a tank of fluid in suspended animation with the ‘dream cap’ on her head.

  Wonder what kind of dream she chose – what kind of synthetic life she picked out to live. I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t dare. It’s not the kind of thing, after all, that one can ask.

  He reached out and picked up the cap again, put it on his head, marshalled his thoughts anew. The writer clicked into sudden life:

  Man was bewildered. But not for long. Man tried. But not for long.

  For the five thousand could not carry on the work of the millions who had gone to Jupiter to enter upon a better life in alien bodies. The five thousand did not have the skill, nor the dreams, nor the incentive.

  And there were the psychological factors. The psychological factor of tradition which bore like a weight upon the minds of the men who had been left behind. The psychological factor of Juwainism which forced men to be honest with themselves and others, which forced men to perceive at last the hopelessness of the things they sought to do. Juwainism left no room for false courage. And false, foolhardy courage that didn’t know what it was going up against was the one thing the five thousand needed most.

  What they did suffered by comparison with what had been done before and at last they came to know that the human dream of millions was too vast a thing for five thousand to attempt.

  Life was good. ‘Why worry? There was food and clothes and shelter, human companionship and luxury and entertainment – there was everything that one could ever wish.

  Man gave up trying. Man enjoyed himself. Human achievement became a zero factor and human life a senseless paradise.

  Webster took off the cap again, reached out and clicked off the writer.

  If someone would only read it once I get it done, he thought. If someone would read and understand. If someone could realize where human life is going.

  I could tell them, of course. I could go out and buttonhole them one by one and hold them fast until I told them what I thought. And they would understand, for Juwainism would make them understand. But they wouldn’t pay attention. They’d tuck it all away in the backs of their brains somewhere for future reference and they’d never have the time or take the trouble to drag it out again.

  They’d go on doing the foolish things they’re doing, following the footless hobbies they have taken up in lieu of work. Randall with his crew of zany robots going around begging to be allowed to re-design his neighbours’ homes. Ballentree spending hours on end figuring out new alcoholic mixtures. Yes, and Jon Webster wasting twenty years digging into the history of a single city.

  A door creaked faintly and Webster swung around. The robot cat-footed into the room.

  ‘Yes, what is it, Oscar?’

  The robot halted, a dim figure in the half-light of the dusk-filled room.

  ‘It’s time for dinner, sir. I came to see—’

  ‘Whatever you can think up,’ said Webster. ‘And, Oscar, you can lay the fire.’

  ‘The fire is laid, sir.’

  Oscar stalked across the room, bent above the fireplace. Flame flickered in his hand and the kindling caught.

  Webster, slouched in his chair staring at the flames crawling up the wood, heard the first, faint hiss and crackle of the wood, the suction mumble at the fireplace throat.

  ‘It’s pretty, sir,’ said Oscar.

  ‘You like it, too?’

  ‘Indeed I do.’

  ‘Ancestral memories,’ said Webster soberly. ‘Remembrance of the forge that made you.’

  ‘You think so, sir?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘No, Oscar, I was joking. Anachronisms, that’s what you and I are. Not many people have fires these days. No need for them. But there’s something about them, something that is clean and comforting.’

  He stared at the canvas above the mantelpiece, lighted now by the flare of burning wood. Oscar saw his stare.

  ‘Too bad about Miss Sara, sir.’

  Webster shook his head. ‘No, Oscar, it was something that she wanted. Like turning off one life and starting on another. She will lie up there in the Temple, asleep for years, and she will live another life. And this one, Oscar, will be a happy life. For she would have it planned that way.’

  His mind went back to other days in this very room.

  ‘She painted that picture, Oscar,’ he said. ‘Spent a long time at it, being very careful to catch the thing she wanted to express. She used to laugh at me and tell me I was in the painting, too.’

  ‘I don’t see you, sir,’ said Oscar.

  ‘No. I’m not. And yet, perhaps, I am. Or part of me. Part of what and where I came from. That house in the painting, Oscar, is the Webster House in North America. And I am a Webster. But a long ways from the house – a long ways from t
he men who built that house.’

  ‘North America’s not so far, sir.’

  ‘No,’ Webster told him. ‘Not so far in distance. But far in other ways.’

  He felt the warmth of the fire steal across the room and touch him.

  Far. Too far – and in the wrong direction.

  The robot moved softly, feet padding on the rug, leaving the room.

  She worked a long time, being very careful to catch the thing she wanted to express.

  And what was that thing? He had never asked her and she had never told him. He had always thought, he remembered, that it probably had been the way the smoke streamed, wind-whipped across the sky, the way the house crouched against the ground, blending in with the trees and grass, huddled against the storm that walked above the land.

  But it may have been something else. Some symbolism. Something that made the house synonymous with the kind of men who built it.

  He got up and walked closer, stood before the fire with head tilted back. The brush strokes were there and the painting looked less a painting than when viewed from the proper distance. A thing of technique, now. The basic strokes and shadings the brushes had achieved to create illusion.

  Security. Security by the way the house stood foursquare and solid. Tenacity by the way it was a part of the land itself. Sternness, stubbornness and a certain bleakness of the spirit.

  She had sat for days on end with the visor beamed on the house, sketching carefully, painting slowly, often sitting and watching and doing nothing at all. There had been dogs, she said, and robots, but she had not put them in, because all she wanted was the house. One of the few houses left standing in the open country. Through centuries of neglect, the others had fallen in, had given the land back to the wilderness.

  But there were dogs and robots in this one. One big robot, she had said, and a lot of little ones.

  Webster had paid no attention – he had been too busy.

  He swung around, went back to the desk again.

  Queer thing, once you came to think of it. Robots and dogs living together. A Webster once had messed around with dogs, trying to put them on the road to a culture of their own, trying to develop a dual civilization of man and dog.

  Bits of remembrance came to him – tiny fragments, half recalled, of the legends that had come down the years about the Webster House. There had been a robot named Jenkins who had served the family from the very first. There had been an old man sitting in a wheelchair on the front lawn, staring at the stars and waiting for a son who never came. And a curse had hung above the house, the curse of having lost to the world the philosophy of Juwain.