THE meeting was just getting underway when Sally and Vickers arrived.
"Will George be here?" asked Vickers.
Sally laughed a little. "George here?" she asked.
Vickers shook his head. "I guess he's not the type."
"George is a roughneck," said Sally. "A red-hot. A born organizer. How he escaped communism is more than I'll ever know."
"And you? The ones like you?"
"We are the propagandists," she said. "We go to the meetings. We talk to people. We get them interested. We do the missionary work and get the converts who'll go out and preach. When we get them we turn them over to the people like George."
The dowager sitting at the table rapped with the letter opener she was using as a gavel.
"Please," she said. Her voice was aggrieved. "Please. This meeting will come to order."
Vickers held a chair for Sally, then sat down himself. The others in the room were quieting down.
The room, Vickers saw, was really two rooms — the living room and the dining room, with the French doors between them thrown open so that in effect they became one room.
Upper middle class, he thought. Just swank enough not to be vulgar, but failing the grandeur and the taste of the really rich. Real paintings on the wall and a Proven‡al fireplace and furniture that probably was of some period or other, although he couldn't name it,
He glanced at the faces around him and tried to place them. An executive type over there — a manufacturer's representative, he'd guess. And that one who needed a haircut might be a painter or a writer, although not a successful one. And the woman with the iron-grey hair and the outdoor tan was more than likely a member of some riding set.
But it did not matter, he knew. Here it was upper middle class in an apartment house with its doorman uniformed, while across the city there would be another meeting in a tenement that had never known a doorman. And in the little villages and the smaller cities they would meet in houses, perhaps at the banker's house or at the barber's house. And in each instance someone would rap on the table and say would the meeting come to order, please. At most of the meetings, too, there would be a man or a woman like Sally, waiting to talk to the members, hoping to make converts.
The dowager was saying, "Miss Stanhope is the first member on our list to read tonight."
Then she sat back, contented, now that she had them finally quieted down and the meeting underway.
Miss Stanhope stood up and she was, Vickers saw, the personification of frustrated female flesh and spirit. She was forty, he would guess, and manless, and she would hold down a job that in another fifteen years would leave her financially independent — and yet she was running from a spectre, seeking sanctuary behind the cloak of another personality, one from the past.
Her voice was clear and strong, but with a tendency to simper, and she read with her chin held high, in the manner of an elocution student, which made her neck appear more scrawny than it was.
"My period, you may remember," she said, "is the American Civil War, with its locale in the South."
She read:
Oct. 13, 1862 — Mrs. Hampton sent her carriage for me today, with old Ned, one of her few remaining servants, driving, since most of the others have run off, leaving her quite destitute of help, a situation in which many of the others of us also find ourselves…_
Running away, thought Vickers, running away to the age of crinoline and chivalry, to a war from which time had swept away the filth and blood and agony and made of its pitiful participants, both men and women, figures of pure romantic nostalgia.
She read:… _Isabella was there and I was glad to see her, for it had been three years since we had met, that time in Alabama…_
And yet a fleeing now turned into a ready instrument to preach the gospel of that other world, the second world behind the tired and bloody Earth.
Three weeks, he thought. No more than three weeks and they're already organized, with the Georges who do the shouting and the running and occasionally the dying, and the Sallys who do the undercover work.
And yet, even with the other world before them, even with the promise of the kind of life they seek, they still cling to the old nostalgic ritual of the magnolia-scented past. It was the mark of doubt and despair upon them, making them refuse to give up the dream through fear that the actuality, if they reached for it, would dissolve beneath their fingertips, vanish at their touch.
Miss Stanhope read on: _I sat for an hour beside old Mrs. Hampton's bed, reading "Vanity Fair," a book of which she is fond, having read it herself, and having had it read to her since the occurrence of her infirmity, more times than she can remember._
But even if some of them still clung to the scented dream, there were others, the Georges among them, the «activists» who would fight for the promise that they sensed in the second world, and each day there would be more and more of them who would recognize the promise and go out and work for it.
They would spread the word and they would flee the police when the sirens sounded and they would hide in dark cellars and come out again when the police were gone.
The word is safe, thought Vickers. It has been placed in hands that will guard and cherish it, that can do no other than guard and cherish it.
Miss Stanhope read on and the old dowager sat behind the table, nodding her head just a little drowsily, but with a firm grip still upon the letter opener, and all the others were listening, some of them politely, but most with consuming interest. When the reading was done, they would ask questions on points of research and pose other points to be clarified and would make suggestions for the revision of the diary and would compliment Miss Stanhope on the brilliance of her work. Then someone else would stand up and read about their life in some other time and place and once again all of them would sit and listen and repeat the performance.
Vickers felt the futility of it, the dead, pitiful hopelessness. It was as if the room were filled with the magnolia scent, the rose cent, the spice scent of many dusty years.
When Miss Stanhope had finished and the room was stirring with the questions asked and the questions to be asked, he rose quietly from his chair and went out into the Street.
He saw that the stars were shining. And that reminded him of something.
Tomorrow he would go to see Ann Carter,
And that was wrong, he knew. He shouldn't see Ann Carter.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
HE rang the bell and waited. When he heard her footsteps coming across the floor he knew that he should turn from the door and run. He had no right to come here and he knew he shouldn't have — he should have done first things first and there was no reason why he should see her at all, for the dream of her was dead as the dream of Kathleen.
But he had had to come, literally _had_ to. He had paused twice before the door of the apartment building and then had turned around and gone away again. This time he had not turned back, could not turn back, but had gone in and now here he was, before her door, listening to the sound of footsteps coming towards him.
And what, he wondered wildly, would he say to her when the door was opened? What would he do then? Go in as if nothing at all had happened, as if he were the same person and she the same person as they had been the last time they had met?
Should he tell her she was a mutant and, more than that, an android, a manufactured woman?
The door came open and she was a woman, as lovely as he remembered her, and she reached out a hand and drew him in and closed the door behind them and stood with her back against it.
"Jay," she said. "Jay Vickers."
He tried to speak, but he couldn't. He only stood there looking at her and thinking: It can't be true. It's a lie. It simply isn't true.
"What happened, Jay? You said that you would call me."
He held out his arms, fighting not to, and she made a quick, almost desperate motion and was in them. He held her close against him and it was as if the two of them stood in the final consola
tion of a misery which each had believed the other did not know.
"I thought at first you were just a little crazy," she told him. "Remembering some of the things you said over the phone from that Wisconsin town, I was almost sure there was something wrong with you — that you'd gone a little off the beam. Then I got to remembering things, strange little things you had done or said or written and…"
"Take it easy, Ann," he said. "You don't need to tell me."
"Jay, have you ever wondered if you were quite human? If there might not be something in you that wasn't quite the usual pattern — something unhuman?"
"Yes," he said. "I've often wondered that."
"I'm sure you aren't. Not quite human, I mean. And that's all right. Because I'm not human, either."
He held her closer then. Feeling her arms around him, he knew finally that here were the two of them, clinging to one another, two wan souls lost and friendless in a sea of humanity. Neither of them had anyone but the other. Even if there were no love between them they still must be as one and stand against the world.
The telephone buzzed at them from its place upon the end table and they scarcely heard it.
"I love you, Ann," he said, and a part of his brain that was not a part of him, but a cold, detached observer that stood off to one side, reminded him that he had known he could not love her, that it was impossible and immoral and preposterous to love someone who might be closer than a sister, whose life surely had once been a part of his life and once again would blend with his life into another personality that might be unaware of them.
"I remembered," Ann told him in a vague and distant voice. "And I haven't got it straight. Maybe you can help me get it straight."
He asked, lips stiff with apprehension: "What did you remember, Ann?"
"A walk I had with someone. I've tried, but I can't recall his name, although I'd know his face, after all these years. We walked down a valley, from a big brick house that stood up on a hill at the valley's head. We walked down the valley and it was springtime because the wild crab apple blossoms were in bloom and there were singing birds and the funny thing about that walk is that I know I never took it, but I remember it. How can you remember something, Jay, when you know it never happened?"
"I don't know," said Vickers. "Imagination, maybe. Something that you read somewhere."
But this was it, he knew. This was the proof of what he had suspected.
There were three of them, Flanders had said, three androids made out of one human life. The three of them had to be himself and Flanders and Ann Carter. For Ann remembered the enchanted valley as he remembered it — but because he was a man he had walked with a woman by the name of Kathleen Preston, and since Ann was a woman, she had walked with a man whose name she could not recall. And when and if she did recall it, of course it would be wrong. For if he had walked with anyone, it had not been with a girl named Kathleen Preston, but a girl with some other name.
"And that's not all," said Ann. "I know what other people think. I…"
"Please, Ann," he said.
"I try not to know what they think, now that I realize that I can do it. Although I know now that I've been doing it, more or less unconsciously, all the time for years. Anticipating what people were about to say. Getting the jump on them. Knowing their objections before they even spoke them. Knowing what would appeal to them. I've been a good business woman, Jay, and that may be why I am. I can get into other people's minds. I did just the other day. When I first suspected that I could do it, I tried deliberately, just to see if I could or was imagining it. It wasn't easy, and I'm not very good at it yet. But I could do it! Jay, I could…"
He held her close and thought: Ann's one of the telepaths, one of those who can go out to the stars.
"What are we, Jay?" she asked. "Tell me what we are."
The telephone shrieked at them.
"Later," he said. "It's not so terribly bad. In some ways it's wonderful. I came back because I loved you, Ann. I tried to stay away, but I couldn't stay. Because it isn't right…"
"It's right," she said. "Oh, Jay, it's the rightest thing there ever was. I prayed that you would come back to me again. When I knew there was something wrong, I was afraid you wouldn't — that you might not be able to, that something awful might have happened to you. I prayed and the prayer was wrong because prayer was strange to me and I felt hypocritical and awful…"
The ringing was a persistent snarl.
"The phone," she said.
He let her go and she walked to the davenport and sat down and took the receiver out of its cradle, while he stood and looked at the room and tried to bring it and Ann into the focus with his memory of them.
"It's for you," she said.
"For me?"
"Yes, the phone. Did anyone know that you were coming here?"
He shook his head, but walked forward and took the receiver and stood with it in his hand, balancing it, trying to guess who might be calling hen and why they might be calling.
Suddenly, he knew that he was frightened, felt the sweat break out beneath his armpits because he knew that it could only be one person at the other end of the phone.
A voice said: "This is the Neanderthaler, Vickers."
"Club and all?" asked Vickers.
"Club and all," said Crawford. "We have a bone to chew."
"At your office?"
"There's a cab outside. It is waiting for you."
Vickers laughed and it was a more vicious sound than he intended it to be. "How long have you been tracking me?"
Crawford chuckled. "Ever since Chicago. We have the country plastered with our analyzers."
"Picking up much stuff?"
"A few strays here and there."
"Still confident about that secret weapon?"
"Sure, I'm confident, but…"
"Go ahead," said Vickers. "You're talking to a friend."
"I have to hand it to you, Vickers. I really got to hand it to you. But get over here fast."
He hung up. Vickers took the receiver down from his ear and stared at it a moment, then placed it in the cradle.
"That was Crawford," he said to Ann. "He wants to talk to me."
"Is everything all right, Jay?"
"Everything's all right."
"You'll come back?"
"I'll come back," said Vickers.
"You know what you are doing?"
"Now I do," said Vickers. "I know what I'm doing now."
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CRAWFORD motioned to the chair beside the desk. Vickers saw with a start that it was the same chair he'd sat in when he'd come to the office, only weeks ago, with Ann.
"It's nice seeing you again," said Crawford. "I'm glad we can get together."
"Your plans must be going well," said Vickers. "You are more affable than when I saw you last."
"I'm always affable. Worried and scared sometimes, but always affable."
"You haven't picked up Ann Carter."
Crawford shook his head. "There's no reason to. Not yet."
"But you're watching her."
"We're watching all of you. The few that are left."
"Any time we want to, we can come unwatched."
"I don't doubt it," Crawford admitted, "but why do you stick around? If I were a mutant, I wouldn't."
"Because we have you licked, and you're the one who knows it," said Vickers. He wished he were half as confident as he hoped he sounded.
"We can start a war," said Crawford. "All we have to do is lift a finger and the shooting begins."
"You won't start it."
"You played your hand too hard. You've pushed us just a bit too much. Now we have to do it — as a last defense."
"You mean the other world idea."
"Exactly," Crawford said.
He sat and stared at Vickers with the pale blue bullet eyes peering out from the rolls of flesh.
"What do you think we'll do?" he asked. "Stand still and let you steamroller us? You
tried the gadgets and we stopped them with, I admit, rather violent methods. But now there's this other thing. The gadgets didn't work, so you tried an idea, a religion, a piece of park bench fanaticism — tell me, Vickers, what do you call this business?"
"The blunt truth," said Vickers.
"No matter what it is, it's good. Too good. It'll take a war to stop it."
"You'd call it subversive, I suppose."
"It is subversive," Crawford said. "Already, just a few days since it started, it has shown results. People quitting their jobs, walking away from their homes, throwing away their money. Poverty, they said, that was the key to the other world. What kind of a gag have you cooked up, Vickers?"
"What happens to these people? The ones who quit their jobs and threw away their money. Have you kept a check on what happens to them?"
Crawford leaned forward in his chair. "That's the thing that scares us. Those people disappeared; before we could round them up, they disappeared."
"They went to the other world," said Vickers.
"I don't know where they went, but I know what will happen if we let it continue. Our workers will leave us, a few at first and then more and more of them and finally…"
"If you want to turn on that war, start reaching for the button."
"We won't let you do this to us," Crawford said. "We will stop you somehow."
Vickers came to his feet and leaned across the desk. "You're done. Crawford. We're the ones who won't let you and your world go on. We're the ones…"
"Sit down," Crawford said.
For a moment Vickers stared at him, then slowly eased his way back into the chair.
"There is one other thing," said Crawford. "Just one other thing. I told you about the analyzers in this room. Well, they're not only in this room. They are everywhere. In railroad terminals, bus depots, hotel lobbies, eating joints..
"I thought as much. That's how you picked me up."
"I warned you once before. Don't despise us because we're merely human. With an organization of world industry you can do a lot of things and do them awfully fast."
"You outsmart yourself," said Vickers. "You've found out a lot of things from those analyzers that you didn't want to know."
Ring Around the Sun Page 20