Ring Around the Sun

by Clifford D. Simak

  "A little cottage up the valley," said Vickers. "It's not much of a place."

  "Worth how much, would you say?"

  "Fifteen or twenty thousand, but I doubt if I could get that much."

  "We'd give you twenty thousand," said the salesman, "subject to appraisal. Our appraisals are most liberal."

  "Look," said Vickers, "I'd only want a five or six room house. That would only come to twenty five hundred or three thousand."

  "Oh, that's all right," the salesman told him. "We'd pay the difference in cash."

  "That doesn't make sense!"

  "Why, of course it does. We're quite willing to pay the going market value on existing structures in order to introduce our own. In your case, we'd pay you the difference, then we'd take your old place and move it away and set up the new one. It's as simple as that."

  Ann spoke to Vickers. "Go ahead and tell the man that you aren't iaving any. This sounds like a good sound business proposition to me, so of course you'll turn it down."

  "Madam," said the salesman, "I don't quite understand."

  "It's just a private joke," Vickers interrupted.

  "Ah… well, I was telling you that this house has some special features."

  "Go ahead, please," said Ann. "Tell us about them."

  "Very happy to. For instance there is the solar plant. You know what a solar plant is."

  Vickers nodded. "A power plant operated by the sun."

  "Exactly," said the salesman. "This plant, however, is somewhat more efficient than the usual solar plant. It not only heats the house in winter, but supplies electrical power for all the year around. It eliminates the necessity of relying upon a public utility for your power. I might add there is plenty of power, much more than you will ever need."

  "A nice feature," said Ann.

  "And it comes fully equipped. You get a refrigerator and a home freezer, an automatic washer and dryer, a dish washer, a garbage disposal unit, a toaster, a waffle iron, radio, television, and other odds and ends."

  "Paying extra for them, of course," said Vickers.

  "Oh, indeed not. _All_ you pay is five hundred a room."

  "And beds?" asked Ann. "Chairs and stuff like that?"

  "I'm sorry," said the salesman. "You have to furnish those yourself."

  "There is an extra charge," Vickers persisted, "for carting way the old house and putting up the new one."

  The salesman drew himself erect and spoke with quiet dignity. "I want you to understand that this is an honest offer. There are _no_ hidden costs. You buy the house and pay — or arrange to pay — at the rate of five hundred a room. We have trained crews of workmen who move away your old house and erect the new one. All of that is included in the original cost. There is nothing added on. Of course, some buyers want to change location. In that case we are usually able to work out an acceptable exchange plan between their old real estate and the new location they select. You, I presume, would want to stay where you are. You said you were up the valley. A most attractive place."

  "Well, I don't know," said Vickers.

  "I forgot to mention one thing," the salesman went on.

  "You never have to paint this house. It is built of material that is of the same color all the way through. The color never wears off or fades. We have a wide range of very attractive color combinations."

  "We don't want to take up too much of your time," said Vickers. "You see, we're not really customers. We just dropped _in_."

  "But you have a house?"

  "Yes, I have a house."

  "And we stand ready to replace the house and pay you a comfortable sum besides."

  "I know all that," said Vickers, "but…"

  "It seems to me," the salesman said, "that you should be the one trying to sell me instead of me trying to sell you."

  "I have a house, and I like it. How would I know I'd like one of these new houses?"

  "Why, sir," said the salesman, "I just been telling you —»

  "I'm used to my house. I'm acquainted with it and it's used to me. I've become attached to it."

  "Jay Vickers!" said Ann. "You can't become that attached to a house in three years. To hear you talk about it, you'd think it was your old ancestral home."

  Vickers was obstinate. "I have the feel of it. I know the place. There's a creaky board in the dining room and I step on it on purpose at times just to hear it creak. And there's a pair of robins that have a nest in the vine on the porch and there's a cricket in the basement. I've hunted for that cricket, but I never could find him; he was too smart for me. And now I wouldn't touch him if I could, because he's a part of the house and —»

  "You'd never be bothered with crickets in one of our houses. They have bug repellent built right into them. You never are bothered with mosquitoes or ants or crickets or anything of the sort."

  "But I'm not bothered with this cricket," said Vickers. "That is what I was trying to tell you. I like it. I'm not sure I'd like a house where a cricket couldn't live. Now, mice, that's a little different."

  "I dare say," declared the salesman, "that you would not have mice in one of our houses."

  "I won't have any in mine, either. I called in an exterminator to get rid of them, and they'll be gone by the time I get home."

  "One thing is bothering me, said Ann to the salesman. "You remember all that equipment you mentioned, the washer and refrigerator and…"

  "Yes, certainly."

  "But you didn't mention anything about a stove."

  "Didn't I?" asked the salesman. "Now, how could I have let it slip my mind? Of course you get a stove."

  CHAPTER NINE

  WHEN the bus reached Cliffwood, darkness was begin to fall. Vickers bought a paper at the corner drugstore and made his way across the street to the town's one clean cafe.

  He had ordered the meal and was just starting on the paper when a piping voice hailed him.

  "Hi, there, Mr. Vickers."

  Vickers put down the paper and looked up. It was Jane, the little girl who had come for breakfast.

  "Why, hello, Jane," he said. "What are you doing here?"

  "Me and Mommy came down to buy some ice cream for supper," Jane explained. She perched herself on the edge of the chair across the table from him. "Where you been today, Mr. Vickers? I came across to see you, but there was a man there and he wouldn't let me in. He said he was killing mice. What was he killing mice for, Mr. Vickers?"

  "Jane," a voice said.

  Vickers looked up and a woman stood there, sleek and maturely beautiful, and she smiled at him.

  "You must not mind her, Mr. Vickers," she said. "Oh, indeed, I don't, I think she's wonderful."

  "I am Mrs. Leslie," said the woman. "Jane's mother. We've been neighbors for a long time now, but we've never met."

  She sat down at the table.

  "I have read some of your books," she said, "and they are wonderful. I haven't read them all. One has so little time."

  "Thank you, Mrs. Leslie," said Vickers and wondered if she would think that he was thanking her for not reading all his books.

  "I had meant to come over and see you," Mrs. Leslie said.

  "Some of us are organizing a Pretensionist Club and I have you on my list."

  Vickers shook his head. "I am pressed for time," he said. "I make it a rule to belong to nothing."

  "But this," said Mrs. Leslie, "would be — well, you might say, this would be down your alley."

  "I am glad you thought of me."

  She laughed at him. "You think us foolish, Mr. Vickers."

  "No," he said, "not foolish."

  "Infantile, then."

  "Since you supplied the word," said Vickers, "I'll agree to it. Yes, I must admit, it does seem just faintly infantile."

  Now, he thought, I've done it. Now she will twist it around so that it will appear it was I, not she, who said it. She'll tell all the neighbors how I told her to her face the club was infantile.

  But she didn't seem insulted. "It must see
m infantile to someone like you who has every minute filled. But I've been told that it's a wonderful way to work up an interest — an outside interest, that is."

  "I have no doubt it is," said Vickers.

  "It's a lot of work, I understand. Once you decide on the period you'd like to pretend you are living in, you must read up on the period and do a lot of research on it and then you have to write your diary and it must be day to day and it must be a full account of each day's activities, and not just a sentence or two and you must make it interesting and, if you can, exciting."

  "There are many periods of history," said Vickers, "that could be made exciting."

  "Now, I'm glad to hear you say that," Mrs. Leslie told him, eagerly. "Would you tell me one? If you were going to choose a period for excitement, Mr. Vickers, which one would you choose?"

  "I'm sorry. I'd have to think about it."

  "But you say there were many…"

  "I know. And yet, when I think of it, it seems to me that the present day might prove as exciting as any of the others."

  "But there's nothing going on."

  "There's too much going on," said Vickers.

  The whole idea was pitiful, of course — grown people pretending they lived in some other age, publicly confessing that they could not live at peace with their own age, but most go burrowing back through other times and happenings to find the musty thrill of vicarious existence. It marked some rankling failure in the lives of these people, some terrible emptiness that would not let them be, some screaming vacuum that somehow had to be filled.

  He remembered the two women who had talked in the bus seat behind him and he wondered momentarily what vicarious satisfaction the Pretentionist living back in Pepys' time might get out of it. There was, of course, Pepys' well filled life, the scurrying about, the meetings with many people, the little taverns where there were cheese and wine, the theaters, the good companionship and the midnight talks, the many interests that had kept Pepys as full of life, as naturally full of life, as these pretentionists were empty.

  The movement itself was escapism, of course, but escapism from what? From insecurity, perhaps. From tension, from a daily, ever-present uneasiness that never quite bubbled into fear, yet never quieted into peace. The state, perhaps, of never being sure — a state of mind that all the refinements of a highly advanced technology could not compensate.

  "They must have our ice cream packed by now," said Mrs. Leslie, gathering up her gloves and purse. "You must come over, Mr. Vickers, and spend an evening with us."

  Vickers rose with her. "Certainly. Some evening very soon," he promised.

  He knew he wouldn't and he knew she didn't want him to, but they both paid lip service to the old fable of hospitality.

  "Come on, Jane," said Mrs. Leslie. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Vickers, after all these years."

  Without waiting for his answer, she moved away.

  "Everything is fine at our house now," said Jane. "Mommy and Daddy have made up again."

  "I'm glad of that," said Vickers.

  "Daddy says he won't run around with women any more," said Jane.

  "I'm glad to hear that, too," said Vickers.

  Her mother called to her across the store.

  "I got to go now," said Jane. She slipped off the chair and ran across the store to her mother's side. She turned and waved at him as they went out the door.

  Poor kid, he thought, what a life she has ahead of her. If I had a little girl like that — he shut the thought away. There was no little girl for him. There was a shelf of books; and there was the manuscript that lay waiting for him, in all its promise and its glory. And suddenly he realized how faint the promise was, how false and shallow the glory might be. Books and manuscripts; he thought. Not much to build a life on.

  And that was it, of course. That was the trouble with not himself alone, but with everyone — no one seemed now to have much on which to build his life. For so many years the world had lived with war or the threat of war. First it had been a frantic feeling, a running to escape, and then it was just a moral and mental numbness that one didn't even notice, a condition that one accepted as the normal way of life.

  No wonder there were Pretentionists, he told himself. With his books and his manuscript, he was one himself.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HE looked under the flower pot on the corner of the stoop to find the key, but it wasn't there and then he remembered that he had left the door unlocked so that Joe could come in and get rid of the mice.

  He turned the knob and went in and made his way across the room to turn on the desk lamp. A white square of paper with awkward pencil scrawls upon it lay beneath the lamp.

  _Jay: I did the job, then came back and opened up the windows to clean out the smell. I'll give you a hundred bucks a throw for every mouse you find. Joe._

  A noise brought him around from the desk and he saw that there was someone on the porch, sitting in his favorite chair, rocking back and forth, a cigarette making a little wavy line dancing in the dark.

  "It's I," said Horton Flanders. "Have you had anything to eat?"

  "I had something in the village."

  "That's a pity. I brought over a tray of sandwiches and some beer. I thought you might be hungry and I know how you hate to cook…"

  "Thanks," said Vickers. "I'm not hungry now. We can have them later."

  He threw his hat onto a chair and went out onto the porch.

  "I have your chair," said Mr. Flanders.

  "Keep it," Vickers said. "This one is just as comfortable."

  "Did you notice if there was any news today? I have a most deplorable habit, at times, of not looking at the papers."

  "The same old thing. Another peace rumor that no one quite believes."

  "The cold war still goes on," said Mr. Flanders. "it's been going on for almost thirty years. It warms up now and then, but it never does explode. Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Vickers, that there have been a dozen times at least when there should have been real war, but somehow or other it has never come to be?"

  "I hadn't thought of it."

  "But it's the truth. First there was the Berlin airlift trouble and the fighting in Greece. Either one of them could have set off a full scale war, hut each of them was settled. Then there was Korea and that was settled, too. Then Iran threatened to blow up the world, but we got safely past it. Then there were the Manila incidents and the flareup in Alaska and the Indian crisis and half a dozen others. But all of them were settled, one way or another."

  "No one really wants to fight," said Vickers.

  "Perhaps not," agreed Mr. Flanders, "but it takes more than just the will for peace to prevent a war. Time and again a major nation has climbed out on a limb to a point where they had to fight or back up. They always have backed up. That isn't human nature, Mr. Vickers, or at least it wasn't human nature until thirty years ago. Does it seem to you that something might have happened, some unknown factor, some new equation, that may account for it?"

  "I don't quite see how there could be any new factor. The human race is still the human race. They've always fought before. Thirty years ago they had just finished the greatest war that ever had been fought."

  "Since then, there has been provocation after provocation and there have been regional wars, but the world has not gone to war. Can you tell me why?"

  "No, I can't."

  "I have thought about it," said Mr. Flanders, "in an idle way, of course. And it seems to me that there must be some new factor."

  "Fear, perhaps," suggested Vickers. "Fear of our frightful weapons."

  "That might be it," admitted Mr. Flanders, "but fear is a funny thing. Fear is just as apt to start a war as it is to hold one off. It is quite possible that fear alone might make a people go out and fight to be rid of fear — willing to go against the fear itself to be rid of it. I don't think, Mr. Vickers, that fear alone can account for peace."

  "You're thinking of some psychological factor?"


  "Perhaps that might be it," said Mr. Flanders. "Or it might be intervention."

  "Intervention! Who would intervene?"

  "I really couldn't say. But the thought is not a new one to me and not in this respect alone. Starting about eighty years or so ago something happened to the world. Up until that time man had stumbled along pretty much in the same old ruts. There had been some progress here and there, some changes, but not very many of them. Not many changes in thinking especially and that is the thing that counts.

  "Then mankind, which had been shambling along, broke into a gallop. The automobile was invented and the telephone and motion pictures and flying machine. There was the radio and all the other gadgetry that characterized the first quarter of the century.

  "But that was largely mechanics, pure and simple, putting two and two together and having four come out. In the second quarter of the century classical physics was largely displaced by a new kind of thinking, a thinking which admitted that it didn't know when it came face to face with the atoms and electrons. And out of that came theories and the physics of the atom and all the probabilities that today still are probabilities.

  "And that, I think, was the greatest stride of all — that the physicists who had fashioned neat cubicles of knowledge and had classified and assigned all the classical knowledge to fit into them snugly should have had the courage to say they didn't know what made electrons behave the way they do."

  "You're trying to say," Vickers put in, "that something happened to whip man out of his rut. But it wasn't the first time a thing like that had happened. Before it there had been the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution."

  "I did not say it was the only time it had ever happened," Mr. Flanders told him. "I merely said it happened. The fact that it had happened before, in a slightly different manner, should prove that it is not an accident, but some sort of cycle, some sort of influence which is operative within the human race. What is it that kicks a plodding culture out of a shuffle into a full-fledged gallop and, in this case at least, keeps it galloping for almost a hundred years without a sign of slackening?"

  "You said intervention," said Vickers. "You're off on some wild fantasy. Men from Mars, maybe?"