Ring Around the Sun
Page 16
Flanders nodded. "I think we understand one another _now_."
"Yes," said Vickers. "I am sure we do. First of all, you want me to stop Crawford. That is quite an order. What if I put a price on it?"
"We have a price," said Flanders. "A most attractive price. I think it will interest you."
"Try me."
"You asked about Kathleen Preston. You asked if there were such a person and I can tell that there is. How old were you when you knew her, by the way?"
"Eighteen."
Flanders nodded idly. "A very fine age to be." He looked at Vickers. "Don't you agree?"
"It seemed so then."
"You were in love with her," said Flanders.
"I was in love with her."
"And she in love with you."
"I think so," Vickers said. "I can't be sure — thinking of it now, I can't be sure, of course. But I think she was."
"You may be assured that she was in love with you."
"You will tell me where she is?"
"No," said Flanders. "I won't."
"But, you…"
"When your job is done, you'll go back to eighteen again."
"And that's the price," said Vickers. "That's the pay I get. To be given back a body that was mine to start with. To be eighteen again."
"It is attractive to you?"
"Yes, I guess so," Vickers said. "But don't you see, Flanders. The dream of eighteen is gone. It has been killed in a forty-year-old android body. It's not just the physical eighteen — it's something else than that. It's the years ahead and the promise of those years and the wild, impractical dreaming of those years and the love that walks beside you in the spring of life."
"Eighteen," said Flanders. "Eighteen and a good chance at immortality and Kathleen Preston, herself seventeen again."
"Kathleen?"
Flanders nodded.
"Just like it was before," said Vickers. "But it won't be the same, Flanders. There is something wrong. Something that has slipped away."
"Just like it was before," insisted Flanders. "As if all these years had never been."
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
So he was a mutant, after all, in the guise of android, and once he had stopped Crawford, he'd be an eighteen-year-old mutant in love with a seventeen-year-old mutant and there was just a possibility that before they died the listener might pin down immortality. And if that were so, then he and Kathleen would walk enchanted valleys forever and forever and they'd have mutant children who would have terrific hunch and all of them would live a life such as the old pagan gods of Earth would look upon with envy.
He threw back the covers and got out of bed and walked to the window. Standing there, he looked down the moonlit enchanted valley where he'd walked that day of long ago and he saw that the valley was an empty place and would stay empty no matter what he did.
He had carried the dream for more than twenty years and now that the dream was coming true, he saw that it was tarnished with all the time between, that there was no going back to that day in 1956, that a man never can go back to a thing he once has left.
You could not wipe out the years of living, you could not pile them neatly in a corner and walk away and leave them. They could be wiped from out your mind and they would be forgotten, but not forever, and the day would come when they'd break through again. And once they'd found you out you'd know that you had lived not one lie, but two.
That was the trouble, you couldn't hide away the past.
The door creaked open and Vickers turned around.
Hezekiah stood in the doorway, the dim light from the landing sparkling on his metal-plastics hide.
"You cannot sleep?" asked Hezekiah. "Perhaps there's something I can do. A sleeping powder, perhaps, or…"
"There's something you can do," said Vickers. "There's a record that I want to see."
"A record, sir?"
"Yes, a record. My family record. You must have it here somewhere."
"In the files, sir. I can get it right away. If you will only wait."
"And the Preston file as well," added Vickers. "The Preston family record."
"Yes, sir," said Hezekiah. "It will take a moment."
Vickers turned on the light beside the bed and sat down on the edge of the bed and he knew what he had to do.
The enchanted valley was an empty place. The moonlight shattering on the whiteness of the pillar was a memory without life or color. The rose-scent upon the long-gone night of June had blown away with the wind of yesteryear.
Ann, he said to himself. I've been a fool too long about Ann. "What about it, Ann?" he spoke, half-aloud. "We've bantered and quarreled and we've used the bantering and the quarreling to cover the love that both of us have held and if it hadn't been for me and my dreaming of a valley, the dream growing cold and my never knowing it, we would have known long ago the way it was with us."
They took from us, he thought, the two of us, the birthright that was ours of living out our life in the body in which we first knew the world. They've made of us neither man nor woman, but something that passes for a man and woman and we walk through the streets of life like shadows flickering down the wall. And now they would take from us the dignity of death and the knowing that our task was done and they make us live a lie — I an android powered by the life force of a man that is not myself, and you alive with a life that is not your own.
"To hell with them," he said. "To hell with all this double living, with this being a manufactured being."
He'd go back to that other Earth and find Ann Carter and he'd tell her that he loved her, not as one loved a moonlight-and-roses memory, but as a man and woman love when the flush of youth is gone and together they would live out what was left to them of life and he would write his books and she would go on with her work and they'd forget, as best they could, this matter of the mutants.
He listened to the house, the little murmurings of a house at night, unnoticed in the daytime when it is filled with human sound. And he thought, if you listened closely and if you knew the tongue, the house would tell you the tales that you wished to know, could tell you the look upon the face and the way a word was spoken and what a man might do or think when he was alone.
The record would not tell the tale that he wished to know, not all the truth that he hoped to find, but it would tell him who he'd been and something about that tattered farmer and his wife who had been his father and his mother.
The door opened and Hezekiah pattered in, with a folder tucked beneath his arm. He handed the folder to Vickers and stood to one side, waiting.
Vickers opened the folder with trembling fingers and it was there upon the page.
_Vickers, Jay, b. A ug. 5. 1937. 1.t. June 20, 1956, h.a., t., i.m., lat._
He studied the line and it made no sense.
"Hezekiah."
"Yes, sir."
"What does all this mean?"
"To what do you refer, sir?"
"This line here," said Vickers, pointing. "This l.t. business and the rest of it."
Hezekiah bent and read it:
"Jay Vickers, born August 5, 1937, life transferred June 20, 1956, hunch ability, time sense, inherent memory, latent mutation. Meaning, sir, that you are unaware."
Vickers glanced at the line above and there he found the names, the place on the bracketed lines that indicated marriage, from which the line bearing his own name sprouted.
_Charles Vickers, b. Jan. 10, 1907, cont. Aug. 8, 1928, aw., t., el., i.m., s.a. Feb. 6, 1961._
And:
_Sarah Graham, b. Apr. 16, 1910, cont. Sept. 12, 1927, aw., ind. comm., t., i.m., s.a. Mar. 9, 1960._
His parents. Two paragraphs of symbols. He tried to make it out.
"Charles Vickers, born January 10, 1907, continued, no, that wouldn't be right…"
"Contacted, sir," said Hezekiah.
"Contacted August 8, 1928, aware, t., el., what's that?"
"Time sense and electronics, sir," said Hezekiah.
"Time sense, sir. The other worlds. They are a matter of time, you know."
"No, I didn't," Vickers said.
"There is no time," said Hezekiah. "Not as the normal human thinks of time, that is. Not a continuous flow of time, but brackets of time, one second following behind the other. Although there are no seconds, no such things as seconds, no such measurement, of course."
"I know," said Vickers. And he did know. Now it all came back to him, the explanation of those other worlds, the following worlds, each one encapsulated in a moment of time, in some strange and arbitrary division of time, each time bracket with its own world, how far back, how far ahead, no one could know or guess.
Somewhere inside of him the secret trigger had been tripped and the inherent memory was his, as it always had been his, but hidden in his unawareness, as his hunch ability still was largely trapped in his unawareness.
There was no time, Hezekiah had said. No such thing as time in the terms of normal human thought. Time was bracketed and each of its brackets contained a single phase of a universe so vastly beyond human comprehension that it brought a man up short against the impossibility of envisioning it.
And time itself, Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past — except there was no future and no past, but an infinite number of brackets, extending either way, each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.
Back on Man's original Earth, there had been speculation on traveling in time, of going back into yesterday or forward into tomorrow. And now he knew that you could not do it, that the same instant of time remained forever within each bracket, that Man's Earth had ridden the same bubble of the single instant from the time of its genesis and that it would die and come to nothing within that self-same instant.
You could travel in time, of course, but there would be no yesterday and no tomorrow. But if you held a certain time sense you could break from one bracket to another, and when you did you would not find yesterday or tomorrow, but another world.
And that was what he had done when he had spun the top, except, of course, that the top had had nothing to do with it — had simply been an aid.
He went on with the line.
"s. a. What is s.a., Hezekiah?"
"Suspended animation, sir."
"My father and my mother?"
"In suspended animation, sir. Waiting for the day when the mutants finally achieve immortality."
"But they died, Hezekiah. Their bodies…
"Android bodies, sir. We must keep the records straight. Otherwise the normal ones would suspect."
The room was bright and cold and naked with the monstrous nakedness of truth.
Suspended animation, His mother and his father waited, in suspended animation, for the day they could have immortality!
And he, Jay Vickers, the real Jay Vickers, what of him? Not suspended animation, certainly, for the life was gone from the real Jay Vickers and was in this android body that sat in this room holding the family record in two android hands.
"Kathleen Preston?" Vickers asked,
Hezekiah shook his head. "I do not know about Kathleen Preston," he said.
"But you got the Preston family record."
Hezekiah shook his head again. "There is no Preston record. I searched the cross-index, sir. There is no Preston mentioned. No Preston anywhere."
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
HE had made a decision and now the decision was no good — made no good by the memory of two faces. He closed his eyes and remembered his mother, remembered every feature, a little idealized, perhaps, but mainly true, and he recalled how she had been horrified by his adventure into fairyland and how Pa talked to him and how the top had disappeared.
Of course the top had disappeared. Of course he had been lectured about too much imagination. After all, they probably had a hard enough time keeping an eye on him and knowing where he was without his wandering into other worlds. An eight-year-old would be hard enough to keep track of on one world, let alone a hundred.
The memory of his mother's face and of his father's hand upon his shoulder, with the fingers of the hand digging into his flesh with a manly tenderness — these were things a man could not turn his back upon.
In utter faith they waited, knowing that when the blackness came upon them it would not be the end, but the beginning of an even greater adventure in living than they had even hoped when they banded themselves with the little group of mutants so many years before.
If they held such faith in the mutant plan, could his be any less?
Could he refuse to do his part toward the establishment of that world for which they had done so much?
They themselves had given what they could; the labor they had expended, the faith they had lavished must now be brought to realization by the ones they had left behind. And he was one of those — and he knew he could not fail them.
What kind of world, he wondered.
Suppose the mutant listeners finally were able to track down the secret of immortality, what kind of world would you have then?
Suppose it really came to pass that Man never need to die, but could live forever and forever?
It would not be the same world then. It would be a different world, with different values and incentives.
What factors would be necessary to make an immortal world keep going? What incentives and conditions to keep it from running down? What opportunity and interest, continually expanding, to save it from the dead-end street of boredom?
What would you need in an immortal world?
Endless economic living room, for one thing; and there would be endless economic living room. For now all the following and preceding worlds lay open. And if that were not enough, there would be the universe, with all its suns and solar systems, for if one earth of a single planet had following and preceding earths, then so must every star and planet in the entire universe be repeated endlessly.
Take the universe and multiply it by an unknown number — take all the worlds there were in all the universe and multiply them by infinity and you would have the answer. There would be room enough, room enough forever.
You would need endless opportunity and endless challenge and in those worlds would lie opportunity and challenge that even eternal Man could not exhaust.
But that would not be the end of it: there would be endless time as well as endless space, and in that time would arise new techniques and new sciences, new philosophies, so that eternal Man need never lack for tasks to do or thoughts to think.
And, once you had immortality, what did you use it for?
You used it to keep up your strength. Even if your tribe were small, even if the birthrate were not large, even if new members of the tribe were discovered but infrequentIy, you still would be sure of growth if no one ever died.
You used it to conserve ability and knowledge. If no one ever died, you could count on the ultimate strength and knowledge and ability of each member of the tribe. When a man died, his ability died with him, and to some extent, his knowledge. But it wasn't only that. You lost not only his present ability and knowledge, but all his future ability and knowledge.
What knowledge, Vickers wondered, did the Earth now lack because a certain man died a dozen years too soon? Some of the knowledge, of course, would be recovered through the later work of other men, but certainly there was much that could never be recovered, ideas that would not be dreamed again, concepts that were blotted out forever by the death of a man within whose brain the first faint stirring of their development had just begun to ferment.
Within an immortal society, such a thing could never happen. An immortal society would be certain of total ability and total knowledge of its manpower.
Take the ability to tap the knowledge of the stars, take the business of inherent memory, take the technical knowledge that made everlasting merchandise — and add immortality.
That was the formula — of what? Of the ultimate
in life? Of the pinnacle of intellect? Of godhood itself?
Go back a hundred thousand years. Consider the creature, Man. Give him fire, the wheel, the bow and arrow, domesticated animals and plants, plus tribal organization and the first, faint dawning concept of Man as the lord of Earth. Take that formula and what did you have?
The beginning of civilization, the foundation of a human culture. That was what you had.
And in its way the formula of fire and wheel and domestic animals was as great as the formula of immortality and time sense and inherent memory.
The formula of the mutants, he knew, was simply another step upward as the fire-wheel-dog formula of a hundred thousand years before had been an earlier forward step.
The mutant formula was not the end result of human effort nor of human intellect and knowledge; it was but a step. There was yet another step. In the future there was still another step. Within the human mind still dwelled the possibility of even greater steps, but what the concepts of those steps might be was as inconceivable to him, Jay Vickers, as the time structure of the following worlds would have been to the man who discovered fire or tamed the dog.
We still are savages, he thought. We still crouch within our cave, staring out beyond the smoky fire that guards the entrance of our cave against the illimitable darkness that lies upon the world.
Some day we'll plumb that darkness, but not yet.
Immortality would be a tool that might help us, and that is all it is. A simple, ordinary tool.
What was the darkness out beyond the cave's mouth?
Man's ignorance of what he was or why he was or how he came to be and what his purpose and his end. The old, eternal question.
Perhaps with the tool of immortality Man could track down these questions, could gain an understanding of the orderly progression and the terrible logic which fashioned and moved the universe of matter and of energy.
The next step might be a spiritual one, the finding and understanding of a divine pattern that was law unto the entire universe. Might Man find at last, in all humility, a universal God — the Deity that men now worshipped with the faintness of human understanding and the strength of human faith? Would Man find at last the concept of divinity that would fill, without question and without quibble, Man's terrible need of faith, so clear and unmistakable that there could be no question and no doubt, as there now was question and doubt; a concept of goodness and of love with which Man could so identify himself that there would then be no need of faith, but faith replaced with knowing and an everlasting sureness?