Highway of Eternity

by Clifford D. Simak

  “So do I,” said David.

  “Horace likes Gahan, though, and if his coming makes Horace livable, we’ll gain from the visit. Timothy is ecstatic. Gahan told Horace he would be bringing Timothy a book—probably a scroll—written by Hecateus.”

  “Hec—well, whatever the name may be. I’ve never heard of him. If it is a him.”

  “A him and a Greek,” said Enid. “Hecateus of Miletus. Fifth or sixth century. Scholars are of the opinion that Hecateus was the first man to write serious historical prose, using a critical method to separate out the myth content of history. Gahan thinks the scroll he has is an unknown book, one that had been lost.”

  “If it is,” said David, “that’s the last we’ll see of Timothy for some time. He’ll lock himself in the library, have his meals brought in. It’ll take him a year to mull his way through it. He’ll be out from underfoot.”

  “I think,” she said, “that he is being led astray, that he is becoming mired in history and philosophy. He is looking for the basic errors we humans made and he thinks that he will find the roots of them in the first few thousand years of human history. He has found a few, of course, but one does not need to study history to be aware of them: the problem of surpluses, the profit motive, and the war motive which arises from one man or tribe having more than another man or tribe may have; or the need of huddling—the need of men and women to huddle in tribes, nations, and empires, reflecting that terrifying sense of insecurity that is part of the human psyche. You could go on and on, of course, but I think Timothy is deluding himself. The meaning that he seeks is a deeper meaning and it is to be found otherwhere than in history.”

  He asked, quite seriously, “Enid, do you have some idea? Even a faint idea?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Perhaps never. All I know is that Timothy is looking in all the wrong places.”

  “Maybe we should be going in to dinner,” he suggested.

  “Yes, I think we should. We can’t keep the others waiting. Emma has been in a tizzy that you would be late. Timothy has been sharpening the carving knife. Nora, out in the kitchen, has been in a flutter. The mutton’s almost done.”

  He offered her his arm and they went across the drawing room, carefully threading their way between the shadowed, half-seen furniture.

  “Oh, there you are!” cried Horace when they came into the dining room. “I have been wondering where you were. The mutton cannot wait, you know. Here, you must, each of you, have a glass of this port. It is quite the best I have tasted in years. It is really excellent.”

  He poured and stepped around the table, handing each of them a glass. He was a squat man, short and powerful of body, and with the appearance of excessive hairiness. His hair and beard were so black that the blackness seemed to shade into blue.

  “You seem in excellent spirit,” David said to him.

  “I am,” said Horace. “Gahan will be here tomorrow. I suppose Enid told you that.”

  “Yes, she did. Will he be alone or will someone else be with him?”

  “He didn’t say. There was reception trouble. Interference of some sort. That is something that has not been perfected. Teddy, back in the Pleistocene, thinks it has to do with stresses in the duration alignment. Maybe something to do with directional anomalies.”

  Horace knew nothing about the problem, David told himself. He might have some slight knowledge of time techniques, but certainly no grasp of the theory. However, on any stated subject, he was an instant expert and could talk convincingly and authoritatively.

  Horace was about to expand further on the matter, but was interrupted when Nora came in from the kitchen, bearing in triumph the platter of mutton. She placed it in front of Timothy and went bustling back into the kitchen. The rest of them found their places at the table and Timothy began the carving of the saddle, making an occasion of it, plying knife and fork with his customary flourish.

  David tasted the port. It was excellent. Occasionally, on certain small matters like the selection of a good bottle of port, the law of averages, unassisted, would make Horace right.

  They ate in silence for some time. Then Horace judiciously wiped his mouth on his napkin, stuffed the cloth back into his lap, and said, “For some time I have been worried about our twentieth-century outpost in New York. I don’t trust this Martin fellow. I’ve been trying to raise him for the last few months and the blighter does not answer.”

  “Maybe he has gone away for a while,” suggested Emma.

  “If he were going,” said Horace, “as our security man, he should have kept us informed. He has this woman, Stella, with him. If he’s not there, at least she could answer.”

  “Maybe she went with him,” said Emma.

  “She shouldn’t have gone. The post should be manned at all times.”

  “I would think,” said David, “that it might be poor policy for us to keep too persistently trying to get in touch with him. As a measure of security, we should keep our communications to a minimum.”

  “We are the only ones in this time segment,” said Horace, “who have time capability. There is no one monitoring.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that,” David told him.

  “What difference does it make?” asked Emma, forever the timid keeper of the peace. “There is no reason for us to be sitting here arguing about it.”

  “This Martin almost never talks with us,” Horace complained. “He never tells us anything.”

  Timothy laid his knife and fork down on his plate, making more of a clatter than was necessary. “Despite the fact,” he said, “that we know nothing of this man and do not entirely trust him, he still may know what he is doing. You are making something out of nothing, Horace.”

  “I met the man and Stella,” said David, “when I went to twentieth-century New York several years ago to run down some books that Timothy wanted. That was the time,” he said to Timothy, “when I brought back the shotgun and rifle for your collection.”

  “Splendid pieces, both of them,” said Timothy.

  “What I can’t understand,” Emma told him sharply, “is why you must keep them loaded. Not only those two, but all the rest of them. A loaded gun is dangerous.”

  “Completeness,” said Timothy. “Certainly even you can appreciate completeness. The ammunition is an integral part of a gun. Without it, a gun is incomplete.”

  “That reasoning escapes me,” said Horace. “It always has.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the guns,” said David. “I am sorry now that I mentioned them. I was only trying to tell you that I met Martin and Stella. I stayed at their place for several nights.”

  “What were they like?” asked Enid.

  “Martin was a cold fish. A very cold fish. Talked very little and when he did, said nothing. I saw him only a few times, briefly each time. I had the feeling he resented my being there.”

  “And Stella?”

  “A cold fish, too. But in a different way. Bitchy cold. Watching you all the time but pretending that she wasn’t.”

  “Either of them seem dangerous? Dangerous to us, I mean.”

  “No, not dangerous. Just uncomfortable.”

  “We may be too complacent,” said Emma in her timid voice. “Events have gone too well for us for a number of years and we may have fallen into the notion they will keep on going well forever. Horace is the only one of us who stays alert. He keeps busy all the time. It seems to me that the rest of us, instead of criticizing him, should be doing something, too.”

  “Timothy keeps as busy as Horace,” said Enid. “He spends all his time sifting through the books and scrolls that have been gathered for him. And who has gathered them for him? It has been David, going out to London and Paris and New York, taking the risk of leaving Hopkins Acre to collect them for him.”

  “That may all be true, my dear,” said Emma, “but, tell me, what might you be doing?”

  “Dear people,” protested Timothy, “we should not be quibbling with one another. And Enid, in he
r own way, does as much as all the rest of us, or more.”

  David glanced down the table at Timothy, his soft-spoken, easy-going brother, and wondered how he put up with Emma and her lout of a husband. Even under the utmost provocation, he never raised his voice. With his saintlike face rimmed by his white and wispy beard, he was the quiet voice of reason before the tempests that at times rocked the family circle.

  “Rather than argue,” said David, “about which of us is doing the most to solve the dilemma that we face, it seems to me that it might be better to admit that no one of us is really doing much that bears upon the problem. Why don’t we, quite simply and honestly, admit that we are refugees, hunched here, huddling, hoping that no one finds us out. I would suggest that none of us, if our life depended on it, could define the problem.”

  “I think some of us here may be on the right track,” said Horace, “and even if we’re not, there are others looking for answers. The people in Athens and the Pleistocene …”

  “That’s exactly it,” said David. “Us, Athens, the Pleistocene, and New York, if Martin and Stella are still there. How many of us altogether?”

  “The point,” said Horace, “is that there must be many other groups. Our three groups—our four groups, really—know of one another. There must be many, bound together as are our four groups, who do not know of us or other groups. This makes sense. Revolutionaries—and we, in a sense, are revolutionaries—are segregated in cells, with only minimal knowledge of one another.”

  “For my part,” said David, stubbornly, “I still think we are pure and simple refugees—the ones who got away.”

  They had finished with the mutton by this time and Nora came in to pick up the platter, returning with a steaming plum pudding that she placed in the center of the table. Emma reached out and pulled it closer.

  “It’s already cut,” she said. “Pass your dessert plates to me. There’s sauce for those who wish it.”

  “I saw Spike today,” said David, “when I was in the fields. He was playing that silly hopping game of his.”

  “Poor Spike,” said Timothy. “He got sucked in with us. He came visiting. He was not one of the family, but he was there when it was time to go. We couldn’t leave him there. I hope that he’s been happy with us.”

  “He seems happy enough,” said Enid.

  “We’re not about to find out if he is or not,” said Horace. “He can’t talk with us.”

  “He understands more than we think he does,” said David. “Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking he is stupid.”

  “He is an alien,” said Timothy. “He was a pet—no, that’s not quite right—he had an association of some sort with a neighboring family. In those days there were some strange associations with the aliens, not all of them entirely understandable. At least to me they weren’t.”

  “With Henry it is different,” said Enid. “He is one of the family. His connection may be a little distant, but he is one of us. He came along willingly enough.”

  “At times I worry about Henry,” said Timothy. “We don’t see much of him.”

  “He’s busy,” said David. “Having a good time. Roaming the countryside beyond Hopkins Acre, scaring the hell out of all the villagers and country folk and perhaps some of the gentry who are still benighted enough to believe in ghosts. He brings in a lot of local information. Because of him, and only because of him, we know a great deal of what is going on out beyond the Acre.”

  “Henry is no ghost,” said Emma, primly. “You shouldn’t talk about him the way you do.”

  “Of course he is no ghost,” David agreed, “but he looks enough like one to fool anybody who doesn’t know.”

  By common consent, they ceased their talk and settled down to the pudding, which was heavy, but exceedingly good.

  I heard you talking of me, said a thought that was not a voice, but a thought so strong and clear that all at the table heard it.

  “It’s Henry,” Emma screeched, all flustered.

  “Of course it is,” said Horace, croaking a little in his throat. “He delights in startling us at unseemly moments. He may be gone for days and then be at one’s elbow, shouting in one’s ear.”

  “Pull yourself together, Henry,” said Timothy, “and sit down quietly in a chair. It is disquieting to be conversing with someone who is invisible.”

  Henry pulled himself, or most of himself, enough together so that he could be seen, though dimly, and sat down in a chair at the foot of the table, opposite Timothy. He was a misty sort of thing, somewhat like a man, although carelessly shaped. But what he pulled together did not stay together too well; it kept drifting back and forth so that the shape of the chair which still could be seen through his tenuous substance wavered with his drifting back and forth.

  You have enjoyed a disgustingly heavy meal, he told them. Everything heavy. The mutton heavy. The pudding heavy. It is this heavy eating that makes all of you as heavy as you are.

  “I am not heavy,” Timothy told him. “I am so thin and stringy I totter in the wind.”

  You never walk in the wind, said Henry. You never leave the house. For years, you have not felt the warmth of honest sunlight.

  “You are almost never in the house,” said Horace. “You have more than your full share of sunlight.”

  I live by sunlight, Henry told him. Certainly you are aware of that. The energy I pluck from the sun is what keeps me going. But it’s not only the sun; it is other things as well. The sweet scent of pasture roses, the singing of the birds, the feel of naked soil, the whisper or the howling of the wind, the great, sweeping bowl of sky, the solid majesty of trees.

  “You have an impressive catalog,” said David, drily.

  It is yours as well.

  “I have some of it,” said David. “I know of what you speak.”

  “Have you seen Spike?” asked Horace.

  Off and on I see him. He is confined to the bubble around Hopkins Acre. I am the only one of you who can pass through the bubble without the help of time. I do some wandering.

  “The wandering’s all right, if that is what you want to do,” said Horace. “But I wish you would cease your pestering of the natives. They look on you as a ghost. You have the neighborhood in a continual uproar.”

  They like it, said Henry. Their lives are dry and dull. They enjoy being scared. They huddle in their chimney corners and tell one another tales. If it were not for me, they’d not have those tales to tell. But that’s not what I am here about.

  “What are you here about?”

  There are those who are curious about the bubble, Henry answered. They don’t know what it is, they’re not sure of its exact location, but they sense it and are curious about it. They are sniffing all about.

  “Not the natives, certainly. There’s no way they could be aware of it. It has stood here for almost a century and a half and …”

  Not the natives, Henry told him. Something else. Something from Outside.

  A deep and solid silence clamped down upon the room. They all sat, glued to their chairs, staring back and forth at one another. An ancient fear came out of the darkness of the house, centering on this one well-lighted room.

  Finally Horace stirred. He cleared his throat and said, “So it has finally happened. I think we knew all along that some day it would. We should have expected it. They have tracked us down.”

  3

  New York

  A wrongness persisted, a sense of aberration, some factor not quite right, the feeling of a corner. But Boone could not pin it down; there seemed no way to reach it.

  Corcoran had been going over the wall of the outermost room of the suite with his flashlight held only inches from the wall, bent forward in his effort to detect any sort of indication of a break in the smoothness of the wall. Now he halted and turned off the flash, swinging around to face Boone. Light from the street outside saved the room from darkness, but it was too dim for Boone to see Corcoran’s face.

  “It’s hopeless,” C
orcoran said. “There is nothing here. Yet I know that outside those windows over there, a structure of some sort is pasted to the outside of this building. I can’t be wrong on that. I saw it.”

  “I believe you, Jay,” said Boone. “There is a wrongness here. I can feel it.”

  “You can’t put a finger on it?”

  “Not yet,” said Boone.

  He walked to one of the windows and looked out into the street. With a start, he saw that it was deserted. No cabs slid smoothly along it, no one was on the sidewalks. Peering more closely, he saw movement in a darkened doorway of the building across the street, then another, darker bulk; and, for only a moment, a glint of light reflected off one of the bulks.

  “Jay,” he asked, “when did you say they’d blow this building?”

  “Sunday morning. Early Sunday morning.”

  “It’s Sunday morning now. There are cops across the street. I saw light flash off a badge.”

  “Four or five o’clock. At first dawn. I checked other operations like this one. Always at first light, before a crowd would have a chance to gather. It’s only a little after midnight. We still have several hours.”

  “I’m not sure of that,” said Boone, “They could steal a march on us, do it before anyone thinks they’ll do it. This is an old, socially historic place. The end of the Everest would be sure to draw a crowd. But if they blew it early, before anyone expected it …”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” said Corcoran, moving over to him. “They simply wouldn’t …”

  A dull thud hit them, buckling them at the knees, and the plaster of the suite began to crack, fissures starting at the corners of the ceiling to run obliquely across it. The floor began to sag.

  Boone grasped desperately at Corcoran, throwing both arms around him tightly.

  And they were in another place, in another suite, a suite where there was no plaster cracking, no slumping of the floor.

  Corcoran pulled angrily away from Boone. “What the hell was that?” he shouted. “Why did you grab …?”

  “The Everest is going down,” said Boone. “Look out the window. See the dust.”