Ring Around the Sun

by Clifford D. Simak

She did not answer.

  The operator said, "That number doesn't answer, sir."

  "Try this one, then," he said, giving the operator the number of her office.

  He waited again and heard the ringing of the signal.

  "That number doesn't answer, sir," the operator said.

  "Thank you," said Vickers.

  "Shall I try again?"

  "No," said Vickers. "Cancel the call, please."

  He had to think and plan. He had to try to figure out what it was all about. Before this it had been easy to seek refuge in the belief that it was imagination, that he and the world were half insane, that everything would be all right if he'd just ignore whatever might be going on.

  That sort of belief was no longer possible.

  For now he must believe what he had half believed before, must accept at face value the story that Crawford had told, sitting in this room, with his massive bulk bulging in the chair, with his face unchanging and his voice a flat monotone that pronounced words, but gave them no inflection and no life.

  He must believe in human mutation and in a world divided and embattled. He must believe even in the fairyland of childhood, for if he were a mutant then fairyland was a mark of it, a part of the thing by which he might know himself and be known by other men.

  He tried to tie together the implications of Crawford's story, tried to understand what it all might mean, but there were too many ramifications, too many random factors, too much he did not know.

  There was a world of mutants, men and women who were more than normal men and women, persons who had certain human talents and certain human understandings which the normal men and women of the world had never known, or having known, could not utilize in their entirety, unable to use intelligently all the mighty powers which lay dormant in their brains.

  This was the next step up. This was evolution. This was how the human race advanced.

  "And God knows," said Vickers to the empty room, "it needs advancement now if it ever did."

  A band of mutants, working together, but working undercover since the normal world would turn on them with fang and claw for their very differentness if they revealed themselves.

  And what was this differentness? What could they do, what did they hope to do with it?

  A few of the things he knew — Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and the light bulbs that did not burn out and synthetic carbohydrates that fed the hungry and helped to hold war at arm's length from the throat of humanity.

  But what else? Surely there was more than that.

  Intervention, Horton Flanders had said, rocking on the porch. Some sort of intervention that had helped the world advance and then had staved off, somehow or other, the bitter, terrible fruits of progress wrongly used.

  Horton Flanders was the man who could tell him, Vickers knew. But where was Horton Flanders now?

  "They're hard to catch," Crawford had said. "You ring doorbells and wait. You send in your name and wait. You track them down and wait. And they're never where you think they are, but somewhere else."

  First, thought Vickers, plotting out his moves, I've got to get out of here and be hard to catch myself.

  Second, find Ann and see that she is hidden out.

  Third, find Horton Flanders and, if he doesn't want to talk, choke it out of him.

  He picked up the top and went downstairs and turned in his key. The clerk got out his bill.

  "I have a message for you," said the clerk, reaching back into the pigeonhole that held the key. "The gentleman who was up to see you just a while ago gave it to me just before he left."

  He handed across an envelope and Vickers ripped it open, pulled out a folded sheet.

  "A very funny kind of business," said the clerk. "He'd just been talking to you."

  "Yes," said Vickers, "it is a very funny business."

  The note read:

  _Don't try to use that car of yours. If anything happens keep your mouth shut._

  It _was_ a very funny kind of business.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  HE drove toward the dawn. The road was deserted and the car ran like a fleeing thing, with no sound but the whistle of the tires as they hugged the pavement on the curves. Beside him, on the seat, the gaily painted top rolled back and forth to the motion of the car.

  There were two things wrong, two immediate things:

  He should have stopped at the Preston house.

  He should not have used the car.

  Both, of course, were foolish things, and he berated himself for thinking of them and pushed the accelerator down so that the whistle of the tires became a high, shrill scream as they took the curves.

  He should have stopped at the Preston house and tried out the top. That, he told himself, was what he had planned to do, and he searched in his mind for the reasons that had made him plan it that way, but there were no reasons. For if the top worked, it would work anywhere. If the top worked, it worked and that was all there could be to it; it wouldn't matter where it worked, although deep inside him was a whisper that it did matter where it worked. For there was something special about the Preston house. It was a key point — it must be a key point in this business of mutants.

  I couldn't take the time, be told himself. I couldn't mess around. There wasn't time to waste. The first job is to get back to New York and find Ann and get her out of sight.

  For Ann, he told himself, must be the other mutant, although once again, as with the Preston house, he could not be entirely sure. There was no reason, no substantial proof, that Ann Carter was a mutant.

  Reason, he thought. Reason and proof. And what are they? No more than the orderly logic on which Man had built his world. Could there be inside a man another sense, another yardstick by which one could live, setting aside the matter of reason and of proof as childish things which once had been good enough, but clumsy at the best? Could there be a way of knowing right from wrong, good and bad without the endless reasoning and the dull parade of proof? Intuition? That was female nonsense. Premonition? That was superstition.

  And yet, were they really nonsense and superstition? For years researchers had concerned themselves with extrasensory perception, a sixth sense that Man might hold within himself, but had been unable to develop to its full capacity.

  And if extrasensory perception were possible, then many other abilities were possible as well — the psycho-kinetic control of objects through the power of mind alone, the ability to look into the future, the recognition of time as something other than the movement of the hands upon a clock, the ability to know and manipulate unsuspected dimensional extensions of the space-time continuum.

  Five senses, Vickers thought — the sense of smell, of sight, of hearing, of taste and touch. Those were the five that Man had known since time immemorial, but did it mean that it was all he had? Were there other senses waiting in his mind for development, as the opposable thumb had been developed, as the erect posture had been developed, as logical thinking had been developed throughout the years of Man's existence? Man had developed slowly. He had evolved from a tree-dwelling, fear-shivering thing into a club-carrying animal, into a fire-making animal. He had made, first of all, the simplest of tools, then more complex tools and finally the tools were so complex that they were machines.

  All of this had been done as the result of developing intelligence and was it not possible that the development of intelligence, the development of the human senses was not finished yet? And if this were true, why not a sixth sense, or a seventh, or an eighth, or any number of additional senses, which, in their development, would come under the general heading of the natural evolution of the human race?

  Was that, Vickers wondered, what had happened to the mutants, the sudden development of these additional and only half-suspected senses? Was not the mutation logical in itself — the thing that one might well expect?

  He swirled through little villages still sleeping between the night and dawn and went past farmhouses lying
strangely naked in the half light that ran on the eastern skyline.

  _Don't try to use the car_, Crawford's note had read. And that was foolish, too, for there was no reason why he should not use the car. No reason other than Crawford's saying so. And who was Crawford? An enemy? Perhaps, although at times he didn't act like one. A man afraid of the defeat that he felt sure would come, more fearful perhaps of the commission of defeat than of defeat itself.

  Reason once again.

  No reason why he should not use the car. But he was faintly uneasy, using it.

  No reason why he should have stopped at, the Preston house and still, in his heart, he knew he had somehow failed in not stopping there.

  No reason to believe Ann Carter was a mutant, and yet he was sure she was.

  He drove through the morning, with the fog rising from all the little streams he crossed, with the flush of sun against the eastern sky, with, finally, boys and dogs going after cows, and the first, well spaced traffic on the road.

  He suddenly knew that he was hungry and a little sleepy, but he couldn't stop to sleep. He had to keep on going. When it became dangerous to drive, he would have to sleep, but not until then and not for very long.

  But he'd have to stop someplace to eat. The next town he came to, if it were big enough, if it had an eating place that was open, he would stop and eat. Perhaps a cup or two of coffee would chase away the sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE town was large and there were eating places and people on the street, the six o'clock factory workers on the move to their seven o'clock jobs.

  He picked out a place that didn't look too bad, that had less of the cockroach look about it than some of the other places, and slowed to a crawl, looking for a parking place. He found one, a block beyond the restaurant.

  He parked and got out, locked the door. Standing on the sidewalk, he sniffed the morning. It still was fresh and cool, with the deceptive coolness of a summer morning.

  He'd have breakfast, he told himself. Take his time eating it, give himself a little time in which to relax, let some of the road fatigue drop from his bones.

  Maybe he should try to call Ann again. Maybe this morning, he could catch her in. He'd feel safer if she knew, if she were in hiding. Perhaps instead of just meeting him at the place where they sold the houses, she should go there and explain to them what the situation was and maybe they would help her. But to do that, to explain that to Ann, would take too long. He had to tell her fast and sure and she had to go on faith.

  He went back down the street and turned in at the restaurant door. There were tables but no one seemed to be using them. All the eaters were bellied up to the counter. There were a few stools still left and Vickers took one.

  On one side of him a hulking workman in faded shirt and bulging overalls was noisily slupping up a bowl of oatmeal, head bent close above the bowl, shoveling the cereal into his mouth with a rapidly moving spoon that dipped and lifted, dipped and lifted, almost as if the man were attempting to establish a siphoning flow of the food into his mouth. On the other side sat a man in blue slacks and white shirt with a neat black bow. He wore glasses and he read a paper and he was, from the look of him, a bookkeeper or something of the sort, a man handy with a column of figures and very smug about it.

  A waitress came and mopped the space in front of Vickers with a dirty cloth.

  "What'll you have?" she asked, impersonally, running the words together until they were one word.

  "Stack of cakes," said Vickers, "with a side of ham."

  "Coffee?"

  "Coffee," said Vickers.

  The breakfast came and he ate it, hurriedly at first, stuffing his mouth with great forkfuls of syrup-dripping cakes, with generous cuts of ham, then more slowly as the first hunger was appeased.

  The overalled man got up and left. A wispy girl with drooping eyelids took his place. Some weary secretary, Vickers thought, with only an hour or two of sleep after a night of dancing.

  He was almost through when he heard the shouting in the street outside, then the sound of running feet.

  The girl beside him swung around on her stool and looked out the window.

  "Everybody's running," she said. "I wonder what's the trouble."

  A man stopped outside the door and yelled, "They found one of them Forever cars!"

  The eaters leaped from their stools and surged toward the door. Vickers followed slowly.

  They'd found a Forever car, the shouting man had said. The only one they could have found was the one he'd parked just up the street.

  They had tipped the car over and rolled it out into the middle of the street. They were ringed around it, shouting and shaking their fists at it. Someone threw a brick or stone at it and the sound of the object striking its metal boomed through the early morning street like a cannon shot.

  Someone picked up whatever had been thrown and heaved it through the door of a hardware store. Reaching in through the broken glass, someone else unlocked the door. Men streamed in and came out again, carrying mauls and axes.

  The crowd drew back to give them elbow room. The mauls and axes flashed in the slanted sunlight. They struck and struck again. The street rang with the sound of metallic hammering. Glass shattered with a crunching sound, then came a metallic clanging.

  Vickers stood beside the restaurant door, sick in the pit of his stomach, his brain frozen with what later might be fear, but which now was no more than astonishment and blind befuddlement.

  Crawford had written: _Don't try to use that car of yours_. And this was what he'd meant.

  Crawford had known what would happen to any Forever car found on the streets.

  Crawford had known and had tried to warn him. Friend or foe?

  Vickers reached out a hand and put it, palm flat, against the rough brick of the building.

  The touch of the brick, the roughness of it, told him that this was happening, that it was no dream, that he actually stood here in front of a restaurant in which he had just eaten breakfast, and saw a mob, mad with fury and with hate, smashing up his car.

  They know, he thought.

  The people finally know. They've been told about the mutants.

  And they hated the mutants.

  Of course, they hated them.

  They hated them because the existence of the mutants makes them second-class humans, because they are Neanderthalers suddenly invaded by a bow and arrow people.

  He turned and went back into the restaurant, walking softly, ready to leap and run if someone should suddenly shout behind him, if a finger tapped his shoulder.

  The bespectacled man with the black bow tie had left the paper beside his plate. Vickers picked it up, walked steadily on, down the length of counter. He pushed open the swinging door that led into the kitchen. There was no one there. He walked through the kitchen rapidly, let himself out the rear door into an alley.

  He went down that alley, found another narrow one between two buildings, leading to an opposite street. He took it, crossed the street when he came to it, followed another alleyway between two buildings that led to still another alley.

  "They'll fight," Crawford had said, sitting in the hotel room the night before, his big body filling the chair to overflowing, "they'll fight with what they have."

  So finally they were fighting, striking back with what they had. They had picked up their club and were fighting back.

  He found a park and walking through it, came across a bench shielded from the Street by a clump of bushes. He sat down and unfolded the paper he had taken from the restaurant, turned its pages back until he found the front page.

  And there the story was.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE headline said: WE ARE BEING TAKEN OVER! The drop read: PLOT BY SUPERMEN REVEALED.

  And under that: Superhuman Race Among Us; Mystery of Everlasting Razor Blades Solved.

  And the story:

  WASHINGTON (Special) — The greatest danger the human race has faced i
n all the years of its existence — a danger which may reduce all of us to slavery — was revealed today in a joint announcement by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the military Chiefs of Staff and the Washington office of the International Bureau of Economics.

  The joint announcement was made at a news conference called by the President.

  Simultaneous announcements were made in all the other major capitals of the world, in London, Moscow, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Cairo, Peking and a dozen other cities.

  The announcement revealed that a new race of human beings, called mutants, has developed, and is banded together in an attempt to win domination over the entire world.

  A mutant, in the sense in which the word is here used, is a human being who has undergone a sudden variation, the child differing from the parent, as opposed to the gradual change by which the human race has evolved to its present form. The variation, in this case, has not been noticeably physical; that is, a mutant is indistinguishable, so far as the eye is concerned, from any other human. The variation has been mental, with the mutant possessing certain skills which the normal human does not have — certain "wild talents," the announcement said.

  (See adjoining column for full explanation of mutancy.)

  The announcement (full text in Column 4) said that the mutants had embarked upon a campaign to destroy the economic system of the world through the manufacture of certain items, such as the everlasting razor blade, the everlasting light bulb, the Forever car, the new prefabricated houses and other items generally sold in the so called "gadget shops."

  The mutant group, it was revealed, has been under investigation by various governmental and independent agencies for several years and the findings, when correlated, showed unmistakably that a definite campaign was under way to take over the entire world. The formal announcement of the situation, it was said, was delayed until there could be no doubt concerning the authenticity of the reports.

  The announcement called upon the citizenry of the world to join in the fight to circumvent the plot. At the same time it pleaded for a normal continuation of all activity and advised against hysteria.