Ring Around the Sun

by Clifford D. Simak

  Mr. Flanders shook his head. "Not men from Mars. I don't think it's men from Mars. Let's be a little more general."

  He waved his cigarette at the sky above the hedge and trees, with its many stars twinkling in the night. "Out there must be great reservoirs of knowledge. At many points in all that space out beyond our earth there must be thinking beings and they would create knowledge that we had never dreamed of. Some of it might be applicable to humans and to earth and much of it would not."

  "You're suggesting that some one from out there —»

  "No," said Mr. Flanders. "I'm suggesting that the knowledge is there and waiting, waiting for us to go out there and get it."

  "We haven't even reached the moon yet."

  "We may not need to wait for rockets. We may not have to go physically to get it. We might reach out with our minds…"

  "Telepathy?"

  "Perhaps. Maybe that is what you could call it. A mind probing out and searching — a mind reaching out for a mind. If there is such a thing as telepathy, distance should make no difference — a half a mile or a light year, what would be the difference? For the mind is not a physical property, it is not bound, or should not be bound, by the laws that say that nothing can exceed the speed of light."

  Vickers laughed uneasily, feeling the slow crawl of invisible, many-footed creatures moving on his neck.

  "You can't be serious," he said.

  "Perhaps I'm not," admitted Mr. Flanders. "Perhaps I'm an old eccentric who has found a man who will listen to him and will not laugh too much."

  "But this knowledge that you talk of. There is no evidence that such knowledge can be applied, that it ever could be used. It would be alien, it would involve alien logic and apply to alien problems and it would be based on alien concepts that we could not understand."

  "Much of it would," said Mr. Flanders. "You would have to sift and winnow. There would be much chaff, but you would find some kernels. You might find, for instance, a way in which friction could be eliminated and if you found that you would have machines that would last forever and you would have —»

  "Wait a minute," snapped Vickers, tensely, "what are you getting at? What about this business of machines that would run forever? We have that already. I was talking to Eb just this morning and he was telling me —»

  "About a car. That, Mr. Vickers, is exactly what I mean."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FOR a long time after Mr. Flanders left, Vickers sat on the porch, smoked his cigarettes and stared at the patch of sky he could see between the top of the hedge and the porch's roof… at the sky and its crystal wash of stars, thinking that one could not sense the distance and the time that lay between the stars.

  Flanders was an old man with a shabby coat and a polished stick and his queer, stilted way of talking that made you think of another time and another culture. What could he know, what possibly could he know of knowledge in the stars?

  Anyone could dream up talk like that. What was it he had said? He had thought of it, in an idle way. And that, Vickers decided, was the way it must be — an idle old eccentric with nothing on his mind except the idle thoughts that took his mind off another life, an old and faded life that he wanted to forget.

  And there, thought Vickers, I am speculating, too, for there's no way that I can know the kind of a life the old man may have led.

  He got up and went into the living room. He pulled the chair out from his desk and sat down and stared at the typewriter sitting there, accusing him of wasted time, of an entire wasted day, pointing with accusing finger at the pile of manuscript that should have been a little thicker if he had stayed at home.

  He picked up a few pages of the manuscript and tried to read, but he had no interest and he was gripped by the terrifying thought that he had gone cold, had lost the spark which drove him day after day to the task of setting down the words that must be written — that literally _must_ be written, as if the writing of them were a means of purging himself of a confusion that lurked inside his mind, as if the writing of them were a task, or penance, that must be done as a condition of his living.

  He had said no, that he wasn't interested in writing Crawford's book and he had said it because he _wasn't_ interested, because he had wanted to come back here and add to the pile of manuscript that lay there on the desk.

  And yet that had not been the only factor — there had been something else. Hunch, he had told Ann, and she had scoffed at him. But there had been a hunch — that and a feeling of danger and of fear, as if a second self had been standing at his side, warning him away.

  It was illogical, of course, for there was no reason why he should have a sense of fear. There had been no reason why he could not have taken on the job. He could have used the money. Ann could have used the fee. There was no logic, no sense, in refusing. And yet, without an instant's hesitation, he had refused the offer.

  He put the sheets of manuscript back on top of the pile, rose from the chair and pushed it flush against the desk.

  As if the whisper of the chair sliding on the carpeting might have been a signal, a scurrying sound came out of one darkened corner and traveled to the next and then was still, so still that Vickers could hear the faint swish of a vine, swung slowly by the wind, scraping against the screen of the porch outside the open door. Then even the vine stopped swaying and the house was still with a deathly stillness that was unnatural, as if the whole house might be waiting for whatever happened next.

  Slowly Vickers turned around to face the room, moving his feet cautiously, pivoting his body with an exaggerated, almost ridiculous, effort to be quiet, to get turned around so he could face the corner from which the sound had come without anything knowing he had turned.

  There were no mice. Joe had come up, while he was in the city, and had killed the mice. There were no mice and there should be no scurrying from one corner to the next. Joe had left a note which even now still lay beneath the desk lamp saying that he would pay one hundred bucks a throw for every mouse that Vickers could produce.

  The silence hung, not so much a silence as a quietness, as if everything were waiting without breathing.

  Moving only his eyeballs, for it seemed that if he moved his head his neck would creak and betray him to whatever danger there might be, Vickers examined the room, with particular emphasis upon the darkened areas in the corners and underneath the furniture and in the shadowed places that were farthest from the light. Cautiously he put his hands behind him, to grasp the desk edge, to get hold of something that was solid so that he did not stand so agonizingly alone, transfixed in the room.

  The fingers of his right hand touched something that was metallic and he knew that it was the metal paperweight that he had lifted off the pile of manuscript when he had sat down at the desk. His fingers reached out and grasped it and dragged it forward into the hollow of his hand and he closed his fingers on it and he had a weapon.

  There was something in the corner by the yellow chair and although it seemed to have no eyes, he knew it was watching him. It didn't know that he had spotted it, or it didn't seem to know, although in the next instant it more than likely would.

  "Now!" said Vickers and the word exploded from him like a cannon blast. His right arm swung up and over and followed through and the paperweight, turning end over end, crashed into the corner.

  There was a crunching sound and the noise of metallic parts rolling on the floor.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THERE were many little tubes, smashed, and an intricate mass of wiring that was bent and broken and funny crystal discs that were chipped and splintered, and the metallic outer shell that had held the tubes and wiring and the discs and the many other pieces of mechanical mystery that he did not recognize.

  Vickers pulled the desk lamp closer to him, so that the light might shine down upon the handful of parts he had gathered from the floor and he put out a finger and stirred it among them, gingerly, listening to the tinkling sounds they made as they clinked toget
her.

  No mouse, but something else — something that scuttled in the night, knowing that he would think it was a mouse; a thing that had scared the cat which knew it was no mouse, and a thing that would not be attracted to traps.

  An electronic contraption, maybe, from the look of tubes and wiring. Vickers stirred the pieces again with a finger and listened to the tinkling as they clinked together.

  An electronic spy, he speculated, a scuttling, scurrying, listening thing that watched his every moment, a thing that stored what it heard and saw for future reference or transmitted directly the knowledge that it gained. But direct to whom? And why? And maybe it wasn't a spying thing, at all. Maybe it was something else, something for which there might be a simpler — or a more weird — explanation. If it were a listening or a seeing device, planted here to spy on him, he would not have caught it. He had never seen one of them before, and for months now he'd heard the scurrying and the scampering that he had thought were mice.

  If it were a spying device it would be made so well, so cleverly that it would be able not only to observe him, but to keep out of sight itself. To have any value it must keep its presence undetected. There would have been no careless moment. It would not have been seen unless it wanted itself to be seen.

  _Unless it wanted itself to be seen!_

  He had been sitting at the desk and had gotten up and pushed the chair flush with the desk and it had been then that he had heard the scampering. If it had not run, he never would have seen it. And it need not have run, for the room was in shadow, with only the desk lamp burning, and his back had been toward the room.

  The cold certainty came to him that it had wanted to be seen, that it had wanted to be trapped in a corner and crushed with a paperweight — that it had run deliberately to call his attention to it and that once he'd seen it, it had not tried to get away.

  He sat at the desk and cold beads of perspiration came out of his forehead and he felt them there but did not lift a hand to brush them off.

  It had wanted to be seen. It had wanted him to know.

  Not it, of course, but the thing behind it — whoever or whatever it was that had caused the contraption to be placed inside his house. For months it had scampered and scurried, had listened and watched, and now the time for the scampering and the watching had come to an end and it was time for something else; time to serve notice on him that he was being watched.

  But why, and who?

  He fought down the cold, screaming panic that rose inside of him, forced himself to stay sitting in the chair.

  There was a clue somewhere in this very day, he thought. Somewhere there was a clue, if he could recognize it. Something happened today that made the agency behind the watcher decide it was time to let him know.

  He ticked off the day's events, marshalling them in his mind as they might be written in a notebook:

  _The little girl who had come to breakfast._

  _ The remembrance of a walk that he had taken twenty years before._

  _ The story in the paper about more worlds than one._

  _The Forever car._

  _The women who had talked in the seat behind him on the bus, and Mrs. Leslie and the club she was organizing._

  _Crawford and his story of a world with its back against the wall._

  _The houses at five hundred dollars a room._

  _ Mr. Flanders sitting on the porch and saying that there was a new-found factor which kept the world from war._

  _The mouse that was not a mouse._

  But that wasn't all, of course; somewhere there was something else that he had forgotten. Without knowing how he knew it, he knew that he had forgotten something, some other tabulated fact that should be inserted somewhere in the list of things that had happened in the day.

  There was Flanders saying that he was interested in the setup of the gadget shops and that he was intrigued by the riddle of the carbohydrates and that he was convinced there was something going on.

  And later in the day he had sat on the porch and talked of reservoirs of knowledge in the stars and of a factor which kept the world from war and of another factor which had whipped Man out of his rut almost a hundred years ago and had kept him at the gallop ever since. He had speculated about these matters in an idle way, he had said.

  But was his speculation idle?

  Or did Flanders know more than he was telling?

  And if he knew, what then?

  Vickers shoved back the chair and got to his feet.

  He looked at the time. It was almost two o'clock.

  No matter, he thought. It's time that I find out. Even if I have to break into his house and jerk him out of bed, screaming in his nightshirt (for he was sure that Flanders would not wear pajamas), it's time that I find out.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LONG before he reached Flanders' house, Vickers saw that there was something wrong. The house was lighted up from basement to garret. Men with lanterns were walking about the yards and there were other knots of men who stood around and talked, while all along the street women and children stood on the porches in hastily snatched-up robes. As if, Vickers thought, they were waiting for a strange three o'clock parade that might at any moment come winding down the street.

  A group of men was standing by the gate and as he turned in, he saw there were some he knew. There was Eb, the garage man, and Joe, the exterminator, and Vic, who ran the drugstore.

  "Hello, Jay," said Eb, "we're glad that you are here."

  "Hello, Jay," said Joe.

  "What's going on?" asked Vickers.

  "Old Man Flanders," said Vic, "has up and disappeared."

  "His housekeeper got up in the night to give him some medicine," said Eb, "and found he wasn't there. She looked around for him for a while and then she went to get some help."

  "You've searched for him?" asked Vickers.

  "Around the place," said Eb. "But we're going to start branching out now. We'll have to organize and get some system in it."

  The drugstore owner said: "We thought at first maybe he'd been up during the night wandering around the house or out into the yard and might have had a seizure, of one sort or another. So we looked near at hand at first."

  "We've gone over the house," said Joe, "from top to bottom and we've combed the yard and there ain't hide nor hair of him."

  "Maybe he went for a walk," Vickers offered.

  "No man in his right mind," declared Joe, "goes walking after midnight."

  "He wasn't in his right mind, if you ask me," said Eb. "Not that I didn't like him, 'cause I did. Never saw a more mannerly old codger in all my born days, but he had funny ways about him."

  Someone with a lantern came down the brick paved walk. "You men ready to get organized?" asked the man with the lantern.

  "Sure, sheriff," said Eb. "Sure, we're ready, any time you are. We just been waiting for you to get it figured out."

  "Well," said the sheriff, "there ain't much that we can do until it gets light, although that's only a couple hours away. But I thought maybe until it got light enough to see we might take some quick scouts out around. Some of the other boys are going to fan out and cover the town, go up and down all the streets and alleys and I thought maybe some of you might like to have a look along the river."

  "That's all right with us," said Eb. "You tell us what you want us to do and we sure will do it."

  The sheriff lifted his lantern to shoulder height and looked at them. "Jay Vickers, ain't it? Glad you joined us, Jay. We need all the men there are."

  Vickers lied, without knowing why he lied: "I heard some commotion going on."

  "Guess you knew the old gent pretty well. Better than the most of us."

  "He used to come over and talk to me almost every day," said Vickers.

  "I know. We remarked about it. He never talked to no one else."

  "We had some common interests," Vickers said, "and I think that he was lonely."

  "The housekeeper said he went over to see yo
u last night."

  "Yes, he did," said Vickers. "He left shortly after midnight." "Notice anything unusual about him? Any difference in the way he talked?"

  "Now, look here, sheriff," said Eb. "You don't think that Jay had anything to do with this?"

  "No," the sheriff said. "No, I guess I don't." He lowered the lantern and said, "If you fellows would go down to the river. Split up when you get there. Some of you go up-stream and some of you go down. I don't expect you to find anything, but we might as well look. Be back by daylight and we'll really start combing for him."

  The sheriff turned away, walking back up the brick pavement, with his lantern swinging.

  "I guess," said Eb, "we might as well get started. I'll take one bunch down the river and Joe will take the others up. That all right with the rest of you?"

  "It's all right with me," said Joe.

  They walked out the gate and down the street until they hit the cross street, then went down to the bridge. They halted there.

  "We split up here," said Eb. "Who wants to go with Joe?"

  Several men said they would.

  "All right," said Eb. "The rest of you come with me." They separated and plunged down from the street to the river bank. Cold river mist lay close along the bank and in the darkness they could hear the swift, smooth tonguing of the river. A night bird cried across the water and looking out to the other bank, one could see the splintered starlight that had shattered itself against the running current.

  Eb asked, "You think we'll find him, Jay?"

  Vickers spoke slowly. "No, I don't. I can't tell you why, but somehow I am pretty sure we won't."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT WAS early evening before Vickers returned home.

  The phone was ringing when he stepped inside the door and he strode across the room and picked it up.

  It was Ann Carter. "I've been trying to get you all day. I'm terribly upset. Where have you been?"