New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6)

by Clifford D. Simak

  Farris nodded. “You think he wanted to talk with you about your new position?”

  “That was what I thought.”

  “Had he talked about it before? Did you know that it was coming?”

  Norman Blaine shook his head. “It was a complete surprise.”

  “A happy one, of course?”

  “Naturally. It’s a better job. Better pay. A man wants to get ahead.”

  Farris looked thoughtful. “Didn’t it strike you as a rather strange procedure to get an appointment—particularly to a key position—in an inter-office envelope?”

  “Of course it did; I wondered about it at the time.”

  “But you did nothing about it?”

  “I have told you,” Blaine said, “I was busy. And what would you suggest that I should have done?”

  “Nothing,” Farris told him.

  “That is what I thought,” said Blaine. He thought: Make something out of it, if you can.

  He felt a brief elation and fought it down. It was too soon, he knew.

  At the moment there wasn’t a thing that Farris could do—not a single thing. The appointment was in order, properly signed and executed. As of the coming midnight he, Norman Blaine, would be administrator of records, taking over from Roemer. Only the delivery of the appointment was not in order, but there was no way in the world that Farris could prove that Blaine had not received it in the inter-office mail.

  He wondered, briefly, what might have happened if Giesey had not died. Would the appointment have come through, or would it have been quashed somewhere along the line? Would some pressure have been brought to bear to give the position to someone else?

  Farris was saying, “I knew the change was going to be made. Roemer was getting—well, just a little difficult. It had come to my attention, and I spoke to Giesey about it. So had several others. We talked about it some; he mentioned you as among several men who could be trusted, but that was all he said.”

  “You didn’t know he had decided?”

  Farris shook his head. “No, but I’m glad he picked you for the post. You’re the kind of man I like to work with, realistic. We’ll get along. We’d better talk about it.”

  “Any time,” said Blaine.

  “If you have the time, how about dropping in on me tonight? Any time at all, I’ll be home all evening. You know where I live?”

  Blaine nodded and got to his feet.

  “Don’t worry about this business,” Farris said. “Lew Giesey was a good man, but there are other good men. We all thought a lot of him. I know it must have been a shock, walking in on him that way.”

  He hesitated for a moment, then: “And don’t worry about any change in your appointment. I’ll speak to whomever replaces Giesey.”

  “Any idea who it’ll be?”

  Farris’ eyelids flicked just once, then his eyes were hard and steady, wavery no longer. “No idea,” he said, brusquely. “The executive board will name the man. I have no idea who they’ll put the finger on.”

  The hell you don’t, thought Blaine.

  “You’re sure about it being suicide?”

  “Certain,” Farris said. “Giesey had a heart history, he was worried.”

  He rose and reached for his cap, put it on. “I like a man who thinks fast on his feet. Keep thinking on your feet, Blaine. We’ll get along.”

  “I’m sure we will.”

  “Don’t forget about tonight.”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” Blaine told him.

  IV

  The Buttonholer had seized upon Norman Blaine that morning, after he had parked his car, just when he was leaving the lot. How the man had gotten in, Blaine could not imagine, but there he was, waiting for a victim. “Just a second, sir,” he said.

  Blaine swung around toward him. The man took a quick step forward, put out both his hands and clasped Blaine’s lapels firmly. Blaine backed away, but the man’s fingers held their grip and halted him.

  “Let me go,” Blaine said, but the man told him, “Not until I’ve had a word with you. You work at the Center and you’re just the man I want to talk with. Because if I can make you understand—why, then, sir, I know that there is hope.

  “Hope,” he said, a fine spray of saliva flying from between his lips—”hope that we can make the people understand the viciousness of Dreams. Because they are vicious, sir, they undermine the moral fiber of the people. They hold the opportunity for quick escape from the troubles and the problems which develop character. With the Dreams, there is no need for a man to face his troubles—he can run away from them, he can seek a forgetfulness in Dreams. I tell you, sir, it is the damnation of our culture.”

  Remembering it now, Norman Blaine still felt the cold, quiet whiteness of the anger that had enveloped him.

  “Let loose of me,” he’d said. There must have been something in his tone which warned the Buttonholer, for the man let loose his grip and backed away. And Blaine, lifting his arm to wipe his face upon his coat sleeve, watched him back away, then finally turn and run.

  It had been the first time he’d ever been seized upon by a Buttonholer, although he had heard of them often and had laughed them off.

  Now, thinking back upon it, he was surprised at the impact of his encounter with a Buttonholer—his horror that here, finally, he had physical evidence that there were persons in the world who doubted the sincerity and the purpose of the Dreams.

  He jerked himself away from his reverie; there were other, more important things with which to concern himself. Giesey’s death and the sheet of paper he had found upon the floor—the strange conduct of Farris. Almost, he thought, as if there were a conspiracy between the two of us—as if he and I had been involved in some gigantic plot, now coming to fruition.

  He sat quietly behind his desk and tried to think it out.

  Given a moment to consider, he was certain that he would not have snatched the paper off the floor; given another moment for consideration, even after having seen what it was, he was certain that he would have dropped it back on the floor again. But there had been no time at all. Farris and his goons were already on their way and Blaine had stood defenseless in the office with a dead man, without an adequate explanation of why he should be there, without an adequate answer to any of the questions that they were sure to ask him.

  The paper had given him a reason for being in the office, had given him the answer to the questions, had forestalled many other questions that would have been asked if he had not had the answer to the first ones.

  Farris had said suicide.

  Would it have been suicide or murder, Blaine wondered, if he had not had the paper in his pocket? If he had remained defenseless, would his luckless position have been used to explain Giesey’s death?

  Farris had said he liked a man who could think standing on his feet. And there was no doubt he did. For Farris himself was a man who could think standing on his feet, who could improvise and trim his course with each passing situation.

  And he was not a man to trust.

  Blaine wondered if the appointment still would have come through if he’d not been there to pick it off the carpet. Certainly he was not the sort of man Paul Farris would have picked to take over Roemer’s job. Would Farris, finding the appointment on the floor, have destroyed it and forged another, appointing someone more to his liking to the post?

  And, another question: What was the importance of the job? Why did it matter, or seem to matter so much, who was appointed to it? No one had said, of course, that it was important; but Farris had been interested and Paul Farris never was interested in unimportant things.

  Could the appointment, in some way, have been linked with Lew Giesey’s death? Blaine shook his head. There was no way that one could answer.

  The important thing was that he had the appointment—that Giesey’s death had not pr
evented its delivery, that for the moment at least Farris was willing to let the situation ride.

  But, Norman Blaine warned himself, he could not afford to take Farris at face value. As steward of the guild, Paul Farris was a police official with a loyal corps of men, with wide discretion in carrying out his functions, politically-minded and unscrupulous, busily carving out a niche large enough to fit full-scale ambition.

  More than likely Giesey’s death fitted in with this ambition. It was not beyond reason that Farris might, in some small and hidden way, have contributed—if, in fact, he had not engineered it.

  Suicide, he had said. Poison. Worried. Heart history. Easy words to say. Watch your step, Blaine told himself. Take it easy. Make no sudden moves. And be ready to duck. Especially—be ready to duck.

  He sat quietly, letting the turmoil of speculation run out of his mind. No use thinking of it, he told himself. No use at all right now. Later, when and if he had some facts to go on—then would be the time to think.

  He glanced at the clock and it was three fifteen. Too early to go home.

  And there was work to do. Tomorrow he’d be moving up to another office, but today there still was work to do.

  He picked up the Jenkins folder and looked at it. A big game hunt, the two zany fabricators had said. We gave him the works, they’d said, or words to that effect.

  He flipped the folder open and ran through the first few pages, shuddering just a little.

  No accounting for tastes, he thought.

  He remembered Jenkins—a great, massive brute of a man who had bellowed out a flow of language that had made the office quake.

  Well, maybe he can take it, Blaine thought. Anyhow, it is what he asked for.

  He tucked the folder under his arm and went out into the reception room.

  Irma said, “We just heard the word.”

  “About Giesey, you mean.”

  “No, we heard that earlier. We all felt badly; I guess everybody liked him. But I mean the word about you. It’s all over now. Why didn’t you tell us right away? We think it’s wonderful.”

  “Why, thank you, Irma.”

  “We’ll miss you, though.”

  “That is good of you.”

  “Why did you keep it secret? Why didn’t you let us know?”

  “I didn’t know myself until this morning; I guess I got too busy. Then Giesey called.”

  “There were goons all over the place, going through the waste baskets. I think they even went through your desk. What was the matter with them?”

  “Just curious.” Blaine went out into the hall and the chill of fear crept up his spine with every step he took.

  He had known it before, of course, with Farris’ crack about thinking on one’s feet, but this put the clincher on it. This left no doubt at all that Farris knew he’d lied.

  Maybe there was some merit in it, after all, though. His lie and bluff put him, momentarily, into Farris’ class—made Blaine the kind of man the goon leader was able to understand, the kind of man he could do business with.

  But could he keep up the bluff? Could he be tough enough?

  Keep cool, Blaine, he told himself. No sudden moves. Ready to duck, although you can’t let them know you are. Poker face, he told himself—the kind of face you use when you face an applicant.

  He tramped on and the coldness wore away.

  Going down the stairs into Myrt’s room, the old magic gripped him once again.

  There she sat—the great machine of dreams, the ultimate in the fabrication of the imaginative details of man’s wildest fantasies.

  He stood in the silence of the place and felt the majesty and peace, the almost-tenderness, that he always felt—as if Myrt were some sort of protective mother-goddess to which one might flee for understanding and unquestioning refuge.

  He tucked the folder more tightly under his arm and walked softly across the floor, fearing to break the hush of the place with an awkward or a heavy footfall.

  He mounted the stairs that led to the great keyboard, and sat down in the traveling seat which would move at the slightest touch to any part of the coding panels. He clamped the open folder on a clipboard in front of him and reached out to the query lever. He pressed it, and an indicator winked a flashing green. The machine was clear, he could feed in his data.

  He punched in the identification and then he sat in silence—as he often sat in silence there.

  This he would miss, Blaine knew, when he moved up to that other job. Here he was like a priest, a sort of communicant with a force that he reverenced, but could not understand—not in its entirety. For no man could know the structure of the dream machine in its entirety. It was too vast and complicated a mechanism to be fixed in any mind.

  It was a computer with magic built into it, and freed from the utter, straight-line logic of other, less fabulous computers. It dealt in fantasy rather than in fact—it was a gigantic plot machine that wove out of punched-in symbols and equations the strange stories of many different lives. It took in code and equations and it dished out dreams!

  Blaine started to punch in the data from the folder sheets, moving swiftly about the face of the coding panel in the traveling chair. The panel began to twinkle with many little lights and from the dream machine came the first faint sounds of tripping relays, the hum of power stirring through the mechanisms, the click of control counters, the faint, far-off chattering of memory files being probed, and the purr of narrative sequence channels getting down to work.

  He worked on in a tense, closed-in world of concentration, setting up the co-ordinates from sheet after sheet. Time came to an end and there was no other world than the panel with its myriad keys, and trips and buttons, and its many flashing lights.

  Finally he was done, the last sheet fluttered down to the floor from the empty clipboard. Time took up again and the room came into being. Norman Blaine sat limply, shirt soaked with perspiration, hair damp against his forehead, hands resting in his lap.

  The machine was thundering now. Lights flashed by the thousands, some of them winking steadily, others running bright little sequences like lazy lightning flashes. The sound of power surged within the room, filling it to bursting, and yet beneath the hum of power could be heard the busy thumps and clicks and the erratic insane chattering of racing mechanisms.

  Wearily Blaine got out of the chair and picked up the fallen sheets, bundling them together, helter-skelter, without regard to numbering, back into the folder.

  He walked to the far end of the machine and stood staring for a moment at the glass-protected cabinet where tape was spinning on a reel. He watched the spinning tape, fascinated, as always, by the thought that upon the tape was impressed the seeming life of a dream that might last a century or a thousand years—a dream built with such sheer story-telling skill that it would never pall, but would be fresh and real until the very last.

  He turned away and walked to the stairway, went halfway up, then turned and looked back.

  It was his last dream, he knew, the last he’d ever punch; tomorrow he’d be on another job. He raised his arm in half salute.

  “So long, Myrt,” he said.

  Myrt thundered back at him.

  V

  Irma had left for the day and the office was empty, but there was a letter, addressed to Blaine, propped against the ash tray on his desk. The envelope was bulky and distorted when he picked it up, it jangled.

  Norman Blaine ripped it open and a ring, crowded full of keys, fell out of it and clattered on the desk. A sheet of paper slipped halfway out and stuck.

  He pushed the keys to one side, took out the sheet of paper and unfolded it. There was no salutation. The note began abruptly: I called to turn over the keys, but you were out and your secretary didn’t know when you would be back. There seemed no point in staying. If you should want to see me later, I am at your
service. Roemer.

  He let the note fall out of his hand and flutter to the desk. He picked up the keys and tossed them up and down, listening to them jangle, catching them in his palm.

  What would happen to John Roemer now, he wondered. Had a place been made for him, or hadn’t Giesey gotten around to appointing him to some other post? Or had Giesey intended that the man be out entirely? That seemed unlikely, for the guild took care of its own; it did not, except under extreme provocation, throw a man out on his own.

  And, for that matter, who would take over the direction of Fabrication? Had Lew Giesey died before he could make an appointment? George or Herb—either one of them—would be in line, but they hadn’t said a word. They would have said something, Blame was sure, if they had been notified.

  He picked up the sheet of paper and read the note again. It was noncommittal, completely deadpan; there was nothing to be learned from it.

  He wondered how Roemer might feel about being summarily replaced, but there was no way of knowing; the note certainly gave no clue. And why had he been replaced? There had been rumors, all sorts of rumors, about a shakeup in the Center, but the rumors had stopped short of the reasons for the shakeup.

  It seemed a little strange—this leaving of the keys, the transfer of authority symbolized by the leaving of the keys. It was as if Roemer had thrown them on Blaine’s desk, said: “There they are, boy; they’re all yours,” and then had left without another word.

  Just a little burned up, perhaps. Just a little hurt.

  But the man had come in person. Why? Under ordinary circumstances, Blaine knew, Roemer would have stayed to break in the man who was to succeed him, then would have gone up to Records. But Roemer would have stayed on until his successor knew the ropes.

  These were not ordinary circumstances. Come to think of it, they seemed to be turning out to be most extraordinary.

  It was a fouled-up mess, Norman Blaine told himself. Going through regular channels, it would have been all right—a normal operation, the shifts made without disruption. But the appointment had not gone through channels; and had Blaine not been the one to find Lew Giesey dead, had he not seen the paper on the floor, the appointment might not have gone through at all.