Ring Around the Sun

by Clifford D. Simak

  He shifted the bow from one hand to another. "Look, Vickers, did you leave someone back there? A wife and some kids, maybe?"

  "No one," said Vickers. "Not a single soul."

  "Well, that's all right. If you had, we'd gone up to the Big House right away and told them about it and they would have fixed it up to bring the wife and kids through, too. That's the only thing about this place. Once you get here, there's no going back. Although why anyone would want to go back is more than I can figure out. So far as I know, there's no one who has wanted to."

  He looked Vickers up and down, laughter tugging at his mouth.

  "You look all gaunted down," he said. "You ain't been eating good."

  "Just fish and some venison I found. And berries."

  "The old lady will have the victuals on. We'll get some food into your belly and get those whiskers off and I'll have the kids heat up some water and you can take a bath, and then we can sit and talk. We got a lot to talk about."

  He led the way, with Vickers following, down the ridge through the heavy timber.

  They came out on the edge of a cleared field green with growing corn.

  "That's my place down there," said Andrews. "Down there at the hollow's head. You can see the smoke."

  "Nice field of corn you have," said Vickers.

  "Knee high by the Fourth. And over there is Jake Smith's place. You can see the house if you look a little close. And just beyond the hogsback you can see John Simmon's fields. There are other neighbors, but you can't see from here."

  They climbed the barbed wire fence and went across the field, walking between the corn rows.

  "It's different here," said Andrews, "than back on Earth. I was working in a factory there and living in a place that was scarcely fit for hogs. Then the factory shut down and there was no money. I went to the carbohydrates people and they kept the family fed. Then the landlord threw us out and the carbohydrates people had been so friendly that I went to them and told them what had happened. I didn't know what they could do, of course. I guess I didn't really expect them to do anything, because they'd helped already more than there was any call to. But, you see, they were the only ones I knew of I could turn to. So I went to them and after a day or two one of them came around and told us about this place — except, of course, he didn't tell us what it really was. He just said he knew of a place that was looking for settlers. He said it was a brand new territory that was opening up and there was free land for the taking and help to get you on your feet and that I could make a living and have a house instead of a two by four apartment in a stinking tenement and I said that we would go. He warned me that if we went, we couldn't come back again and I asked him who in their right mind would want to. I said that no matter where it was, we would go, and here we are."

  "You've never regretted it?" asked Vickers.

  "It was the luckiest thing," said Andrews, "that ever happened to us. Fresh air for the kids and all you want to eat and a place to live with no landlord to throw you out. No dues to pay and no taxes to scrape up. Just like in the history books."

  "The history books?"

  "Sure, you know. Like when America was first discovered and the pioneers piled in. Land for the taking. Land to roll in. More land than anyone can use and rich, so rich you just scratch the ground a little and throw in some seed and you got a crop. Land to plant things in and wood to burn and build with and you can walk out at night and look up at the sky and the sky is full of stars and the air is so clean it seems to hurt your nose when you draw it in."

  Andrews turned and looked at Vickers, his eyes blazing.

  "It was the best thing that ever happened to me," he said, as if daring Vickers to contradict him.

  "But these mutants," asked Vickers. "Don't they get into your hair? Don't they lord it over you?"

  "They don't do anything but help us. They send us a robot to help out with the work when we need to have some help and they send a robot that lives with us nine months of the year to teach the kids. One robot teacher for each family. Now ain't that something. Your own private teacher, just like you went out and hired yourself a high-toned private tutor like the rich folks back on Earth."

  "And you don't resent these mutants? You don't feel they are better than you are? You don't hate them because they know more than you do?"

  "Mister," said Asa Andrews, "you don't want to let anyone around these parts hear you talking like that. They're apt to string you up. When we first came, they explained it all to us. They had indoct — indoctrin —»

  "Indoctrination courses."

  "That's it. They told us what the score was. They told us what the rules were and there aren't many rules."

  "Like not having any firearms," said Vickers.

  "That's one of them," Andrews admitted. "How did you know that?"

  "You're hunting with a bow."

  "Another one is that if you get into a row with anybody and can't settle it peaceable the two of you are to go up to the Big House and let them settle it. And if you get sick you're to let them know right away so they can send you a doctor and whatever else you need. Most of the rules work to your benefit."

  "How about work?"

  "Work?"

  "You have to earn some money, haven't you?"

  "Not yet," said Andrews. "The mutants give us everything we want or need. All we do is work the land and grow the food. This is what they call… let me see now… what was that word

  — oh yes, this is what they call the pastoral-feudal stage. You ever hear a word like that?"

  "But they must have factories," Vickers persisted, ignoring the question. "Places where they make the razor blades and stuff. They'd need men to work in them."

  "They use robots. Just lately they started making a car that would last forever. The plant is just a ways from here. But they use robots to do the entire job. You know what a robot is."

  Vickers nodded. "There's another thing," he said. "I was wondering about natives."

  "Natives?"

  "Sure, the people on this earth. If there are people on this earth."

  "There aren't any," Andrews said.

  "But the rest of it is the same as the other Earth," said Vickers. "The trees, the rivers, the animals…"

  "There aren't any natives," Andrews said. "No Indians or nothing."

  So here, thought Vickers, was the difference from the Earth ahead, the tiny aberration that made a different world. Far back, somehow, there had been a difference that had blocked Man from rising, some minor incident, no doubt; some failing of the spark of intellect. Here there had been no striking of the flint for fire, no grasping of a stone that would become a weapon, no wonder glowing in the brutish brain — a wonder that in later years would become a song or painting or a single paragraph of exquisite writing or a flowing poem…

  "We're almost home," said Andrews.

  They climbed the fence that edged the corn field and walked across a pasture toward the house.

  Someone yelled a joyous greeting and a half dozen kids came running down the hill, followed by a dozen yelping dogs. A woman came to the door of the house, built of peeled logs, and peered toward them, holding her hand to shade her eyes against the sun. She waved to them and Andrews waved back and then the kids and dogs descended on them in a yelping, howling, happy pack.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  HE lay in bed, in the loft above the kitchen, and listened to the wind pattering on bare feet across the shingles just above his head. He turned and burrowed his head into the goose-down pillow and beneath him the corn shuck mattress rustled in the dark.

  He was clean, washed clean in the tub behind the house, with water heated in a kettle on an outdoors fire, lathering himself with soap while Andrews sat on a nearby stump and talked and the children played in the yard and the hound dogs lay sleeping in the sun, twitching their hides to chase away the flies.

  He had eaten, two full meals of food such as he had forgotten could exist after days of half-cooked fish an
d half-rotten venison — cornbread and sorghum and young rabbits fried in a smoking skillet, with creamed new potatoes and greens the children had gone out and gathered and a salad of water cress pulled from the spring below the house and for supper fresh eggs just taken from the nest.

  He had shaved, with the children ringed around him watching, after Andrews had seated him on a stump and had used the scissors to trim away the beard.

  And after that he and Andrews had sat on the steps and talked while the sun went down and Andrews had said that he knew of a place that was crying for a house — a tucked-in place just across the hill, with a spring a step or two away and some level ground on a bench above the creek where a man could lay out his fields. There was wood in plenty for the house, great tall trees and straight, and Andrews said that he would help him cut them. When the logs were ready the neighbors would come in for the raising and Jake would bring along some of the corn that he'd been cooking and Ben would bring his fiddle and they'd have themselves a hoedown when the house was up. If they needed help beyond what the neighbors could supply, all they'd have to do was send word up to the Big House and the mutants would send a gang of robots. But that probably wouldn't be necessary, Andrews had said. The neighbors were a willing lot, he said, and always ready to help; glad, too, to see another family moving in.

  Once the house was built, said Andrews, Simmons had some daughters running around his place that Vickers might want to have a look at, although you could do your picking blind if you wanted to, for they were a likely lot. Andrews had dug Vickers in the ribs with his elbow and had laughed uproariously and Jean, Andrews' wife, who had come out to sit with them a while, had smiled shyly at him and then had turned to watch the children playing in the yard.

  After supper, Andrews had showed him with some pride the books on the shelf in the living room and had said that he was reading them, something he had never done before — something he had never wanted to do before, nor had the time to do. Vickers, looking at the books, had found Homer and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Austen, Thoreau and Steinbeck.

  "You mean you're reading these?" he asked.

  Andrews had nodded. "Reading them and liking them, mostly. Once in a while I find it a little hard to wade through them, but I keep reading on. Jean likes Austen best."

  It was a good life here, said Andrews, the best life they'd ever known and Jean smiled her agreement and the kids had lost an argument about letting the dogs come in and sleep the night with them.

  It _was_ a good life, Vickers silently agreed. Here again was the old American frontier, idealized and bookish, with all the frontier's advantages and none of its terror and its hardship. Here was a paternal feudalism, with the Big House on the hill the castle that looked down across the fields where happy people lived and took their living from the soil. Here was a time for resting and for gathering strength. And here was peace. Here there was no talk of war, no taxes to fight a war, or to prevent a war by a proved willingness to fight.

  Here was — what had Andrews said? — the pastoral-feudal stage. And after that came what stage? The pastoral-feudal stage for resting and thinking, for getting thoughts in order, for establishing once again the common touch between Man and soil, the stage in which was prepared the way for the development of a culture that would be better than the one they had left.

  This was one earth of many earths. How many others followed close behind: hundreds, millions? Earth following earth, and now all the earths lay open.

  He tried to figure it out and he thought he saw the pattern that the mutants planned. It was simple and it was brutal, but it was workable.

  There was an Earth that was a failure. Somewhere, on the long path that led up from apedom, they had taken the wrong turning and had travelled since that day a long road of misery. There was brilliance in these people, and goodness, and ability — but they had turned their brilliance and their ability into channels of hate and arrogance and their goodness had been buried in selfishness.

  They were good people and were worth the saving, as a drunkard or a criminal is worthy of rehabilitation. But to save them, you must get them out of the neighborhood they live in, out of the slums of human thought and method. There could be no other way of giving them the opportunity to break themselves of old habits, of the ingrown habits of generation after generation of hate and greed and killing.

  To do this, you must break the world they live in and you must have a plan to break it and after it is broken, you must have a program that leads to a better world.

  But first of all, there must be a plan of action.

  First you shattered the economic system on which old Earth was built. You shattered it with Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and with synthetic carbohydrates that would feed the hungry. You destroyed industry by producing, once and for all, things that industry could not duplicate and things that made industry obsolete and when you shattered industry to a certain point, war was impossible and half the job was done. But that left people without jobs, so you fed them with carbohydrates while you tried to funnel them to the following earths that lay waiting for them. If there wasn't room enough on Earth Number Two, you sent some of them to Number Three and maybe Number Four, so that you had no crowding, so there was room enough for all. On the new earths there was a beginning again, a chance to dodge the errors and skirt the dangers that had bathed Old Earth in blood for countless centuries.

  On these new earths you could build any sort of culture that you wished. You could even experiment a little, aim at one culture on the Second Earth and a slightly different one on Number Three and yet a different one on Four. And after a thousand years or so you could compare these cultures and see which one was best and consult the bales of data you had kept and pinpoint each mistake in each particular culture. In time you could arrive at a formula for the best in human cultures.

  Here on this earth, the pastoral-feudal culture was the first step only. It was a resting place, a place for education and for settling down. Things would change or be changed. The sons of the man in whose house he lay would build a better house and probably would have robots to work his fields and make his living, while he himself would live a leisured life and out of a leisured people, with their energies channeled by good leadership, would come paradise on earth — or on many earths.

  There had been that article in the paper he had read on that morning — was it only days ago? — which had said that the authorities were alarmed at mass disappearances. Whole families, the article had said, were dropping out of sight for no apparent reason and with no apparent thing in common except abject poverty. And, of course, it would be the ones in abject poverty who would be taken first — the homeless and the jobless and the sick — to be settled on these earths that followed in the track of the dark and bloody Earth inhabited by Man.

  Soon there would be little more than a handful of people on the dark and bloody Earth. Soon, in a thousand years or less, it would go tumbling on its way alone, its hide cleansed of the ravening tribe which had eaten at it and gutted it and mangled it and ravished it — and this same tribe would be established on other earths, under better guidance, to create for themselves a life that would be a better life.

  Beautiful, he thought. Beautiful — and yet, there was this matter of the androids.

  Begin at the beginning, he told himself. Start with first facts, try to see the logic of it, to figure out the course of mutancy.

  There always had been mutants. If there had not been, Man would still be a little skittering creature hiding in the jungle, taking to the trees, terrified and skulking.

  There had been the mutation of the opposable thumb. There had been mutations within the little brain that made for creature cunning. Some mutation, unrecorded, had captured fire and tamed it. Another mutation had evolved the wheel. Still another had invented the bow and arrow. And so it went, on down the ages. Mutation on mutation, building the ladder that mankind climbed.

  Except that the creature who had
captured and tamed the flame did not know he was a mutant. And neither had the tribesman who had thought up the wheel, nor the first bowman.

  Down through the ages there had been unsuspected and unsuspecting mutants — men who were successful beyond the success of others, great business figures or great statesmen, great writers, great artists, men who stood so far above the herd of their fellow men that they had seemed giants in comparison.

  Perhaps not all of them were mutants, though most of them must have been. But their mutancy would have been a crippled thing in comparison with what it could have been, for they were forced to limit themselves, forced to conform to the social and economic pattern set by a non-mutant society. That they had been able to conform, that they had been able to fit themselves to a smaller measure than their normal stature, that they had been able to get along with men who were less than they and still stand out as men of towering ability was in itself a measure of their mutancy.

  Although their success had been large in the terms of normal men, their mutancy had been a failure in that it never reached its full realization and this was because these men had never known what they were. They had been just a little smarter or a little handier or somewhat quicker than the common run of mankind.

  But suppose that a man should realize that he was a mutant? Suppose that he knew from a piece of indisputable evidence — what would happen then?

  Suppose, for example, a man should find that he could reach out to the stars and that he could catch the thoughts and plans of the thinking creatures who lived on planets circling those far suns — that would be full and sufficient proof that he was a mutant. And if he could obtain from his seeking in the stars some specific information of certain economic value — say, the principle of a frictionless machine — then without question he would know that he had a mutant gift. Once knowing, he would not be able to fit so snugly, nor so smugly, into his contemporary niche as those men who had been mutants but had never known they were. Knowing, he would have the itch of greatness, would know the necessity of following his own path and not the beaten path.