“I have the feel of it,” Vickers stated obstinately. “I know the place. There is a creaky board in the dining room and I step on it on purpose at times just to hear it creak. And there’s a pair of robins that have a nest in the vine on the porch and there’s a cricket in the basement. I’ve hunted for that cricket, but I never could find him; he was too smart for me. And now I wouldn’t touch him if I could, because he is a part of the house and—”
“You’d never be bothered with crickets in one of our houses. They have bug repellant built right into them. You never are bothered with mosquitoes or ants or crickets or anything of the sort.”
“BUT I’m not bothered with this cricket,” said Vickers. “That is what I was trying to tell you. I like it. I’m not sure I’d like a house where a cricket couldn’t live. Now, mice, that’s a little different.”
“I dare say,” declared the salesman, “that you would not have mice in one of our houses.”
“I won’t have any in mine, either. I called the exterminator and they’ll be gone by the time I get home.”
“Well, now,” the salesman said, “there is something else to consider in connection with our house. We put them up in one day’s time. You give us an order tonight and by tomorrow night you can move in. And if, for some reason or other, you move to another city or another part of the country, we will undertake to move your house for you. With our houses there is no need to go through the ordeal of selling the old house, moving to your new location and then spending weeks, if not months, hunting for the kind of house you want to buy. You move your house right along with you, like your briefcase or your golf clubs.
“Let’s say you aren’t moving to another city. Maybe you just get dissatisfied with the location that you have. You want to move out to the country or to another section of the city. Pick out the place you want to go and let us know. Give us twenty-four hours and we’ll move the house for you.”
“I suppose,” said Ann, “it costs a lot to have the house moved.”
“Not at all,” the salesman answered. “One per cent of the purchase price, that’s all. In the case of a five room house, that would be twenty-five dollars.”
“But suppose it was clear across the country . . .”
“It makes no difference,” said the salesman. “We make money on some, lose on others. In the end, we even out.”
“One thing is bothering me,” said Ann. “You remember all that equipment you mentioned, the washer and refrigerator and television and . . .?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“But you didn’t even once happen to mention a stove.”
“Didn’t I?” asked the salesman. “Now how could I have let it slip my mind? Of course you get a stove.”
IX
WHEN the bus reached Cliffwood, darkness was beginning to fall. Vickers bought a paper at the corner drugstore and made his way across the street to the town’s one clean cafe.
He had ordered the meal and was just starting on the paper when a piping voice hailed him. “Hi there, Mr. Vickers.” Vickers put down the paper and looked up. It was Jane, the moppet who had come for breakfast.
“Why, hello, Jane,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“Me and Mommy came down to buy some ice cream for supper,” Jane explained. She perched herself on the edge of the chair across the table from him. “Where you been today, Mr. Vickers? I came across to see you, but there was a man there and he wouldn’t let me in. He said he was killing mice. What “Was he killing mice for, Mr. Vickers?”
“Jane,” a voice said.
Vickers looked up and a woman stood there, sleek and maturely beautiful, and she smiled at him.
“You must not mind her, Mr. Vickers,” she said.
“I don’t. I think she’s wonderful.”
“I’m Mrs. Leslie,” said the woman. “Jane’s mother. We’ve been neighbors for a long time now, but we’ve never met.”
She sat down at the table.
“I’ve read some of your books,” she said, “and they are splendid.
I haven’t read them all. One has so little time.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Leslie,” said Vickers, and wondered if she would think that he was thanking her for not reading all his books.
“I had meant to come over and see you. Some of us are organizing a Pretentionist club and I have you on my list.”
Vickers shook his head. “I am always pressed for time. I make it a rule to belong to no organization.”
“But this,” said Mrs. Leslie, “would be—well, you might say this would be down your alley.”
“I am glad you thought of me.” She laughed at him. “You think us foolish, Mr. Vickers.”
“No,” he said, “not foolish.”
“Infantile, then.”
“Since you supplied the word,” said Vickers, “I must admit it does seem somewhat infantile.”
NOW, he thought, I’ve done it.
She will twist it around so that it will appear it was I, not she, who said it. She’ll tell all the neighbors how I told her to her face the club was infantile.
But she didn’t seem insulted. “It must seem that way to someone like you who has every minute filled. But I think it might be a wonderful way to work up an interest—an outside interest, that is.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Vickers.
“It’s a lot of work, I understand. You decide on the period you’d like to pretend you are living in. Then you must read up on the period and write your diary and it must be a full account of each day’s activities and not just a sentence or two. You must make it interesting and, if you can, exciting.”
“There are many periods of history that could be made exciting.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Mrs. Leslie replied eagerly. “Would you tell me one? If you were going to choose a period for excitement, which would you choose?”
“I’m sorry,” Vickers said. “I’d have to think about it.”
“But I just heard you say there were many . . .”
“I know. And yet, when I think of it, the present day might prove as exciting as any of the others.”
“But there’s nothing going on!”
“There’s too much going on,” said Vickers.
The whole idea was pitiful, of course—grown people pretending they lived in some other age, publicly confessing that they could not live at peace with their own age, but must go burrowing back through time to find the musty thrill of vicarious existence. It marked some rankling failure in the lives of these people, some terrible emptiness that would not let them be, some screaming vacuum that somehow had to be filled.
HE remembered the two women who had talked in the bus seat behind him and he wondered momentarily what illusory satisfaction the Pretentionist living back in Pepys’ time might get out of it. There was, of course, Pepys’ well filled life, the scurrying about, the meetings with many people, the little taverns where there were cheese and wine, the theatres, the good companionship and the midnight talks, the many interests that had kept Pepys as naturally full of life as these Pretentionists were empty.
The movement itself was escapism, obviously, but escapism from what? From insecurity, perhaps. From a daily, ever-present tension that never quite bubbled into fear, yet never quieted into peace. The state, perhaps, of never being sure—a state of mind for which all the advantages of a highly advanced technology could not compensate.
“They must have our ice cream packed by now,” said Mrs. Leslie, gathering up her gloves and purse. “You must come over, Mr. Vickers, and spend an evening with us.”
Vickers rose with her. “Some evening very soon,” he promised.
He knew he wouldn’t and he knew she didn’t want him to, but they both paid lip service to the old fable of hospitality.
“Come along, Jane,” said Mrs. Leslie. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Vickers, after all these years.”
Without waiting for his answer, she moved away.
&
nbsp; “Everything is fine at our house now,” said Jane. “Mommy and Daddy have made up again.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Vickers.
“Daddy says he won’t run around with women no more.”
“I’m glad to hear that, too.”
Her mother called to her across the store.
“I got to go now,” said Jane. She slipped off the chair and ran to her mother’s side. She turned and waved at him as they went out the door.
Poor kid, he thought, what a life she has ahead of her. If I had a little girl like that—he shut the thought away. There was no little girl for him. There was a shelf of books and the manuscript that lay waiting for him; not much to build a life on.
That was the trouble with not himself alone, but with everyone—no one seemed now to have too much on which to build a life. For years the world had lived with war or the threat of war. First it had been a frantic feeling, a running to escape, and then it was just a moral and mental numbness that one didn’t even notice, a condition that one accepted as the normal way of life.
No wonder there were Pretentionists. With his books and manuscripts, he was one himself.
HE looked under the flower pot in the comer of the stoop to find the key, but there was none, and then he remembered that he had left the house unlocked so that Joe could come in and get rid of the mice.
He turned the knob and went in and made his way across the room to turn on the desk lamp. A white square of paper with awkward pencil scrawls upon it lay underneath the lamp.
Jay: I did the job, then came back and opened up the windows to clean out the smell. I’ll give you a hundred bucks a throw for every mouse you find. Joe.
A noise brought him around from the desk and he saw that there was someone on the porch, sitting in his favorite chair, rocking back and forth, a cigarette making a little wavy line dancing in the dark.
“It’s I,” said Horton Flanders. “Have you had anything to eat?”
“I grabbed a meal in the village.”
“That’s a pity. I brought over a tray of sandwiches and some beer. I thought you might be hungry and I know how you hate to cook . . .”
“Thanks,” said Vickers. “I’m not hungry now. We can have them later.”
He threw his hat on a chair and went out to the porch.
“I have your chair,” said Mr. Flanders.
“Keep it,” Vickers said. “This one is just as comfortable.”
“Did you notice if there was any news today? I have a most deplorable habit, at times, of not looking at the papers.”
“The same old thing. Another peace rumor that no one quite believes.”
“Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Vickers, that there have been a dozen times at least when there should have been real war, but somehow or other it has never come to be?”
“I hadn’t thought of it.”
“But it’s the truth,” said Mr. Flanders. “First there was the Berlin airlift trouble and the fighting in Greece. Either one of them could have set off a full scale war, but each of them was settled. Then there was Korea and that was settled, too. Iran later threatened to blow up the world, but we got safely past it. Then there were the Manila incidents and the flareup in Alaska and the Indian crisis and half a dozen Others. But all of them were settled, one way or another.”
“No one really wants to fight,” said Vickers.
“Perhaps not, but it takes more than just the desire for peace to prevent a war. Time and again major nations have climbed so far out on a limb that they had to fight or back up. They always have backed up. That isn’t human nature, Mr. Vickers, or at least it wasn’t human nature until thirty years ago. Does it seem to you that something might have happened, some unknown factor, some new equation, that may account for it?”
“I don’t see how there could be any new factor. The human race is still the human race. It’s always fought before. Thirty years ago it had just finished the greatest war that ever had been fought.”
“Since then, there has been provocation after provocation and there have been regional wars, but the world has not gone to war. Can you tell me why?”
“No, I can’t.”
“I HAVE thought about it,” said Mr. Flanders, “in an idle way, of course. And it seems to me that there must be some new factor.”
“Fear, perhaps,” suggested Vickers. “Fear of our frightful weapons.”
“That might be it, but fear is a funny thing. It is just as apt to start a war as it is to hold one off, make a people go out and fight to be rid of fear—willing to go against the fear itself to be rid of it. I don’t think, Mr. Vickers, that fear alone can account for peace.”
“Then what factor do you think it might be?”
“Intervention,” Mr. Flanders said.
“Intervention! Who would intervene?”
“I really couldn’t say. But the thought is not a new one to me and not in this respect alone. Starting about 80 years or so ago, something happened to the world. Up until that time, Man had stumbled along pretty much in the same old ruts. There had been some progress here and there, some changes, but not very many of them. Not many changes in thinking especially, and that is what really counts.
“Then mankind, which had been shambling along, broke into a gallop. The automobile was invented and the telephone and motion pictures and flying machine. There was the radio and all the other gadgetry that characterized the first quarter of the century.
“But that was largely mechanics, putting two and two together and having four come out. In the second quarter of the century, classical physics was largely displaced by a new kind of thinking, which admitted that it didn’t know when it came face to face with the atoms and electrons. And out of that came theories and the physics of the atom and all the probabilities that today still are probabilities.
“And that, I think, was the greatest stride of all—that the physicists who had fashioned neat cubicles of knowledge and had classified and assigned all the classical knowledge to fit into them snugly should have had the courage to say they didn’t know what made electrons behave the way they do.”
“You’re trying to say,” Vickers put in, “that something happened to whip Man out of his rut. But it wasn’t the first time a thing like that had happened. Before it there had been the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.”
“I did not say it was the only time it had ever happened.” Mr. Flanders told him. “I merely said it happened. The fact that it had happened before, in a slightly different manner, should prove that it is not an accident, but some sort of cycle, some sort of influence which is operative within the human race. What is it that kicks a plodding culture out of a shuffle into a full-fledged gallop and, in this case at least, keeps it galloping for almost a hundred years without a sign of slackening?”
“You said intervention. You’re off on some wild fantasy. Men from Mars, maybe?”
Mr. Flanders shook his head. “Let’s be a little more general.” He waved his cigarette at the sky above the hedge and trees, with its many stars twinkling in the night. “Out there must be great reservoirs of knowledge. At many points in all that space beyond our Earth there must be thinking beings and they would create knowledge that we had never dreamed of. Some of it might be applicable to humans and to Earth and much of it would not.”
“You’re suggesting that someone in another solar system—”
“No,” said Mr. Flanders. “I’m suggesting that the knowledge is there and waiting, waiting for us to go out and get it.”
“We haven’t even reached the Moon yet.”
“We may not need to wait for rockets. We might reach out with our minds . . .”
“Telepathy?”
“Maybe that is the word for it. A mind probing out and searching—a mind reaching out for a mind. If there is such a thing as telepathy, distance should be no barrier. A half a mile or half across the Universe, what would be the difference? For the mind is not a physical property; it is not
bound, or should not be bound, by the laws that say that nothing can exceed the speed of light.”
Vickers laughed uneasily, feeling the slow crawl of invisible, many-footed creatures moving on his neck.
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Perhaps I’m not,” admitted Mr. Flanders. “Perhaps I’m an old eccentric who has found a man who will listen to him and will not laugh too much.”
“But this knowledge that you talk of. There is no evidence that it exists or that it ever could be applied. It would be alien. It would involve alien logic and apply to alien problems and it would be based on alien concepts that we could not understand.”
“Much of it would. There would be much chaff, but you would find some kernels. You might find, for instance, a way in which friction could be eliminated and if you found that you would have machines that would last forever and you would have—”
, “Wait a minute,” snapped Vickers, tensely. “What are you getting at? What about this business of machines that would run forever? We have that already. I was talking to Eb just this morning and he was telling me—”
“About a car. That, Mr. Vickers, is one of the things I was talking about.”
XI
FOR a long time after Mr. Flanders left, Vickers sat on the porch, smoked his cigarettes and stared at the patch of sky he could see between the top of the hedge and the porch’s roof . . . at the sky and its crystal wash of stars, thinking that one could not sense the distance and the time that lay between the stars.
Flanders was an old man with a shabby coat and a polished stick and a queer, stilted way of talking that made you think of another era and another culture. What could he possibly know of knowledge in the stars?
He had thought of it, he’d said, in an idle way. And that, Vickers realized, was the way it was—an eccentric with nothing on his mind except the idle speculations that took his mind off an old and faded life that he wanted to forget.
And there, thought Vickers, I am speculating, too, for there’s no way that I can know the kind of life the old man may have led.
The Complete Serials Page 41
