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Ring Around the Sun

Page 13

by Clifford D. Simak


  He did not think about that. He did not want to think about it. He finally went to sleep.

  In the morning he went down the river and studied the bluff-studded southern shore as he slogged along and was more sure than ever from the character of the bluffs that he knew where he was.

  He followed the river down and finally saw the misty blue of the great rock-faced bluff that rose at the junction of the rivers and the thin violet line of the bluffs beyond the greater river, so he climbed one of the nearer bluffs and spied out the valley he had hunted.

  He camped that night in the valley and the next morning followed it and found the other, branching valley that would lead to the Preston house.

  He was halfway up it before it became familiar, although he had seen here and there certain rock formations and certain clumps of trees that had seemed to him to bear some similarity to ones he had seen before.

  The suspicion and the hope grew in him, and at last the certainty, that he tread familiar ground.

  Here once again, was the enchanted valley he had travelled twenty years before!

  And now, he thought — and now, if the house is there.

  He felt faint and sick at the certainty it would not be there, that he would reach the valley's head and would see the land where it should have stood and it would not be there. For if that happened, he would know that the last of hope was gone, that he was an exile out of his familiar Earth.

  He found the path and followed it and he saw the wind blow across the meadow grass so that it seemed as if the grass were water and the whiteness of its wind-blown stems were whitecaps rolling on it. He saw the clumps of crab-apple trees and they were not in bloom because the season was too late, but they were the same that he had seen in bloom.

  The path turned around the shoulder of a hill and Vickers stopped and looked at the house standing on the hill and felt his knees go wobbly beneath him and he looked away, quickly, and brought his eyes back slowly to make sure it was not imagination, that the house was really there.

  It was really there.

  He started up the path and he found that he was running and forced himself to slow to a rapid walk. And then he was running again and he didn't try to stop.

  He reached the hill that led up to the house and he went more slowly now, trying to regain his breath, and he thought what a sight he was, with weeks of beard upon his face, with his clothing ripped and torn and matted with the dirt and filth of travel, with his shoes falling to shreds, tied upon his feet with strips of cloth ripped from his trouser legs, with his frayed trousers blowing in the wind, showing dirt-streaked, knobbly knees.

  He reached the white picket fence that ran around the house and stopped beside the gate and leaned upon it, looking at the house. It was exactly as he had remembered it, neat, well-kept, with the lawn well-trimmed and flowers growing brightly in neat beds, with the woodwork newly painted and the brick a mellow color attesting to years of sun upon it and the force of wind and rain.

  "Kathleen," he said, and he couldn't say the name too well, for his lips were parched and rough. "I've come back again."

  He wondered what she'd look like, after all these years. He must not, he warned himself, except to see the girl he once had known, the girl of seventeen or eighteen, but a woman near his own age.

  She would see him standing at the gate and even with the beard and the tattered clothes and the weeks of travel on him, she would know him and would open the door and come down the walk to greet him.

  The door opened and the sun was in his eyes so that he could not see her until she'd stepped out on the porch.

  "Kathleen," he said.

  But it wasn't Kathleen.

  It was someone he'd never seen before — a man who had on almost no clothes at all and who glittered in the sun as he walked down the path and who said to Vickers, "Sir, what can I do for you?"

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  THERE was something about the glitter of the man in the morning sun, something about the way he walked and the way he talked that didn't quite fit in. He had no hair, for one thing. His head was absolutely bald and there was no hair on his chest. His eyes were funny, too. They glittered like the rest of him and he seemed to have no lips.

  "I'm a robot, sir," said the glittering man, seeing Vickers' puzzlement.

  "Oh," said Vickers.

  "My name is Hezekiah."

  "How are you, Hezekiah?" Vickers asked inanely, not knowing what else to say.

  "I'm all right," replied Hezekiah. "I am always all right. There is nothing to go wrong with me. Thank you for asking, sir."

  "I had hoped to find someone here," said Vickers. "A Miss Kathleen Preston. Does it happen she is home?"

  He watched the robot's eyes and there was nothing in them.

  The robot asked, "Won't you come in, sir, and wait?"

  The robot held the gate open for him and he came through, walking on the walk of mellowed brick and he noticed how the brick of the house was mellowed, as well, by many years of sun and by the lash of wind and rain. The place, he saw, was well kept up. The windows sparkled with the cleanliness of a recent washing and the shutters hung true and straight and the trim was painted and the lawn looked as if it had not been only mowed, but razored. Gay beds of flowers bloomed without a single weed and the picket fence marched its eternal guard around the house straight as wooden soldiers and painted gleaming white.

  They went around the house, and the robot turned and went up the steps to the little porch that opened on the side entrance and pushed the door open for Vickers to go through.

  "To your right, sir," Hezekiah said. "Take a chair and wait. If there is anything you wish, there is a bell upon the table."

  "Thank you, Hezekiah," Vickers said.

  The room was large for a waiting room. It was gaily papered and had a small marble fireplace with a mirror over the mantle and there was a hush about the room, a sort of official hush, as if the place might be an antechamber for important happenings.

  Vickers took a chair and waited.

  What had he expected? Kathleen bursting from the house and running down the steps to meet him, happy after twenty years of never hearing of him? He shook his head. He had indulged in wishful thinking. It didn't work that way. It wasn't logical that it should.

  But there were other things that were not logical, either, and they had worked out. It had not been logical that he should find this house in this other world, and still he had found it and now sat beneath its roof and waited. It had not been logical that he should find the top he had not remembered and finding it, know what to use it for. But he had found it and he had used it and was here.

  He sat quietly, listening to the house.

  There was a murmur of voices in the room that opened off the waiting room and he saw that the door which led into it was open for an inch or two.

  There was no other sound. The house lay in morning quiet.

  He got up from his chair and paced to the window and from the window back to the marble fireplace.

  Who was in that other room? Why was he waiting? Who would he see when he walked through that door and what would they say to him?

  He swung around the room, walking softly, almost sneaking. He stopped beside the door, standing with his back against the wall, holding his breath to listen.

  The murmur of voices became words.

  "…going to be a shock."

  A deep, gruff voice said, "It always is a shock. There's nothing you can do to take the shock away. No matter how you look at it, it always is degrading."

  A slow, drawling voice said, "It's unfortunate we have to work it the way we do. It's too bad we can't let them go on in their legal bodies."

  Businesslike, clipped, precise, another voice, the first voice, said, "Most of the androids take it fairly well. Even knowing what it means, they take it fairly well. We make them understand. And, of course, out of the three, there's always the lucky one, the one that can go in his actual body."

&
nbsp; "I have a feeling," said the gruff voice, "that we started in on Vickers just a bit too soon."

  "Flanders said we had to. He thinks Vickers is the only one that can handle Crawford."

  And Flanders' voice saying, "I am sure he can. He was a late starter, but he was coming fast. We gave it to him hard. First the bug got careless and he caught it and that set him to thinking. Then, after that, we arranged the lynching threat. Then he found the top we planted and the association clicked. Give him just another jolt or two…"

  "How about that girl, Flanders? That — what's her name?"

  "Ann Carter," Flanders said. "We've been jolting her a bit, but not as hard as Vickers."

  "How will they take it?" asked the drawling voice. "When they find they're android?"

  Vickers lurched away from the door, moving softly, groping with his hands, as if he were walking in the dark through a room peopled with obstructing furniture.

  He reached the door that led into the hall and grasped the casing and hung on.

  Used, he thought.

  Not even human.

  "Damn you, Flanders," he said.

  Not only he, but Ann — not mutants, not superior beings at all, not any sort of humans. Androids!

  He had to get away, he told himself. He had to get away and hide. He had to find a place where he could curl up and hide and lick his wounds and let his, mind calm down and plan what he meant to do.

  For he was going to do something. It wasn't going to stay this way. He'd deal himself a hand and cut in on the game.

  He moved along the hall and reached the door and opened it a crack to see if anyone was there. The lawn was empty. There was no one in sight.

  He went out the door and closed it gently behind him and when he hit the ground, jumping from the tiny porch, he was running. He leaped the fence and hit the ground, still running.

  He didn't look back until he reached the trees. When he did, the house stood serenely, majestically, on its hilltop at the valley's head.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  So he was an android, an artificial man, a body made out of a handful of chemicals and the cunning of man's mind and the wizardry of man's technique — but out of the cunning and the wizardry of the mutant mind, for the ordinary, normal men who walked the parent Earth, the original Earth, had no such cunning of their minds, they could make an artificial man and make him so well and cleverly that even he, himself, would never know for sure. And artificial women, too — like Ann Carter.

  The mutants could make androids and robots and Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and a host of other gadgets, all designed to wreck the economy of the race from which they sprang. They had synthesized the carbohydrate as food and the protein to make the bodies of their androids, and they knew how to travel from one earth to another — all those earths that trod on one another's heels down the corridors of time. This much he knew they could do and were doing. What other things they might be doing, he had no idea. Nor no idea, either, of the things they dreamed or planned.

  "You're a mutant," Crawford had told him, "an undeveloped mutant. You're one of them." For Crawford had an intelligent machine that could pry into the mind and tell its owner what was in the mind, but the machine was stupid in the last analysis, for it couldn't even tell a real man from a fake.

  No mutant, but a mutant's errand boy. Not even a man, only an artificial copy.

  How many others, he wondered, could there be like him? How many of his kind might roam the Earth, going about their appointed tasks for the mutant master? How many of his kind did Crawford's men trail and watch, not suspecting that they did not trail and watch the mutant, but a thing of mutant manufacture? That, thought Vickers, was the true measure of the difference between the normal man and mutant — that the normal man could mistake the mutant's scarecrow for the mutant.

  The mutants made a man and turned him loose and watched him and allowed him to develop and set a spying mechanism that they called a bug to watch him, a little mechanical mouse that could be smashed with a paper weight.

  And in the proper time they jolted him — they jolted him for what? They stirred up his fellow townsmen so he fled a lynching party; they planted for him to find a toy out of childhood and waited to see if the toy might not trip a childhood association; they fixed it so he would drive a Forever car when they knew that driving such a car could cause him to be mobbed.

  And after they had jolted an android, what happened to him then?

  What happened to the androids once they had been used for the purpose of their making?

  He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he'd talk to him again. And now he knew something of what was going on and Crawford might be very interested.

  And something else as well — some tugging, nagging knowledge that seemed to bubble in his brain, trying to get out. Something that he knew, but could not remember.

  He walked on through the woods, with its massive trees and its deep-laid forest mold and thick matting of old leaves, with its mosses and its flowers and its strange silence filled with uncaring and with comfort.

  He had to find Ann Carter. He had to tell her what was going on and together, the two of them would somehow stand against it.

  He halted beside the great oak tree and stared up at its leaves and tried to clear his mind, to wipe it clean of the chaos of his thinking so he could start fresh again.

  There were two things that stood out above all others:

  He had to get back to the parent Earth.

  He had to find Ann Carter.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  VICKERS did not see the man until he spoke.

  "Good morning, stranger," someone said, and Vickers wheeled around. The man was there, standing just a few feet away, a great, tall, strong man dressed much as a farm hand or a factory worker might be dressed, but with a jaunty, peaked cap set upon his head and a brilliant feather stuck into the cap.

  Despite the rudeness of his clothing, there was nothing of the peasant about the man, but a cheerful self-sufficiency that reminded Vickers of someone he'd read about and he tried to think who it might be, but the comparison eluded him.

  Across the man's shoulder was a strap that held a quiver full of arrows and in his hand he held a bow. Two young rabbits hung lifeless from his belt and their blood had smeared his trouser leg.

  "Good morning," said Vickers, shortly.

  He didn't like the idea of this man popping up from nowhere.

  "You're another one of them," the man said.

  "Another one of what?"

  The man laughed gaily, "We get one of you every once in a while," he said. "Someone who has blundered through and doesn't know where he is. I've often wondered what happened to them before we were settled here or what happens to them when they pop through a long ways from any settlement."

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Another thing you don't know," said the man, "is where you are."

  "I have a theory," Vickers said. "This is a second earth."

  The man chuckled. "You got it pegged pretty close," he said. "You're better than the most of them. They just flounder around and gasp and won't believe it when we tell them that this is Earth Number Two."

  "That's neat," said Vickers. "Earth Number Two, is it? And what about Number Three?"

  "It's there, waiting when we need it. Worlds without end, waiting when we need them. We can go on pioneering for generation after generation. A new earth for each new generation if need be, but they say we won't be needing them that fast."

  "They?" challenged Vickers. "Who are they?"

  "The mutants," said the man. "The local ones live in the Big House. You didn't see the Big House?"

  Vickers shook his head, warily.

  "You must have missed it, coming up the ridge. A big brick place with a white picket fence around it and other buildings that look like barns, but they aren't barns."

  "Aren't they?"

  "No," said the man. "
They are laboratories and experimental buildings and there is one building that is fixed up for listening."

  "Why do they have a place for listening? Seems to me you could listen almost anywhere. You and I can listen without having a special place fixed up for us."

  "They listen to the stars," the man told him.

  "They listen…" began Vickers, and then remembered Flanders sitting on the porch in Cliffwood, rocking in the chair and saying that great pools and reservoirs of knowledge existed in the stars, that it was there for the taking and you might not need rockets to go there and get it, but might reach out with your mind and that you'd have to sift and winnow, but you'd find much that you could use.

  "Telepathy?" asked Vickers.

  "That's it," said the man. "They don't listen to the stars really, but to people who live on the stars. Now ain't that the screwiest thing you ever heard of — listening to the stars!"

  "Yes, I guess it is," said Vickers.

  "They get ideas from these people. They don't talk to them, I guess. They just listen in on them. They catch some of the things they're thinking and some of the things they know and a lot of it they can use and a lot of it don't make no sense at all. But it's the truth, so help me, mister."

  "My name is Vickers. Jay Vickers."

  "Well, I'm glad to know you, Mr. Vickers. My name is Asa Andrews."

  He walked forward and held out his hand and Vickers took it and their grip was hard and sure.

  And now he knew where he'd read of this man before. Here before him stood an American pioneer, the man who carried the long rifle from the colonies to the hunting grounds of Kentucky. Here was the stance, the independence, the quick good will and wit, the steady self reliance. Here, once again, in the forests of Earth Number Two, was another pioneer type, sturdy and independent and a good man for a friend.

  "These mutants must be the people who are putting out the everlasting razor and all that other stuff in the gadget shops," said Vickers.

  "You catch on quick," said Andrews. "We'll go up to the Big House in a day or two and you can talk to them."

 

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