The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Then there’s this business of listening to the stars.”

  “We’ve gotten many good ideas that way,” said Flanders. “Not all of us can do it. Just some of us who are natural telepaths. And as I told you that night we talked, not all the ideas are ones that we can use. Sometimes we just get a hint of something and we go on from there.”

  “And where are you headed? Where do you intend to go?”

  “That’s one that I can’t answer. There are new possibilities being added all the time, new directions opening out. We’re close to many great discoveries. For one thing, immortality. There is one listener . . .”

  “You mean,” asked Vickers, “everlasting life?”

  “Why not?”

  OF course, thought Vickers, why not? If you had everlasting razor blades and everlasting light bulbs, why not everlasting, life?

  “And androids?” Vickers asked. “Where would an android like myself fit in? Surely, an android can’t be too important.”

  “We have a job for you,” said Flanders. “Crawford is your job.”

  “What do I do with Crawford?”

  “You stop him.”

  “Stop him? Me? Do you know what’s back of Crawford?”

  “I know what’s back of you.”

  “Tell me,” Vickers said.

  “The highest, most developed hunch ability that ever has been registered in a human being. The highest ever registered and the most unsuspected, the least used of any we have ever known.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re forgetting that I’m not a human being.”

  “Once you were. You will be again. Before we took your life.”

  “Took my life!”

  “The life essence,” said Flanders, “the mind, the thoughts and impressions and reactions that made up Jay Vickers—the real Jay Vickers—aged eighteen. Like pouring water from one vessel to another. We poured you from your body into an android body and we’ve kept and guarded your body against the day we can pour it back again.”

  Vickers came half out of his chair.

  Flanders waved a hand at him. “Sit down. You were going to ask me why.”

  “And you’re going to answer me,” said Vickers.

  “Certainly I will answer you. When you were eighteen, you were not aware of the ability you had. There was no way to make you aware of it. It would have done no good to tell you or to attempt to train you. You had to grow into it. We figured it would take fifteen years, but it took more than twenty and you aren’t even yet as aware as you should be.”

  “But I could have . . .”

  “Yes,” said Flanders, “you could have grown aware of it in your own body, except that there is another factor—inherent memory. Your genes carry the inherent memory factor, another mutation that occurs as infrequently as our telepathic listeners. Before Jay Vickers started fathering children, we wanted him to be entirely aware of his hunch ability.”

  Vickers remembered how he had speculated on the possibility of inherent memory, while lying on the corn-shuck mattress in the loft of Andrews’ house. Inherent memory, memory passed on from father to son. His father had known about inherent memory, so he had guessed it, too. He had known about it, or at least he’d remembered it when the time had come for him to know about it, when he was growing—he groped for the word—aware.

  “So that is it,” said Vickers. “You want me to put the hunch on Crawford and my children because they will have hunch, too.”

  FLANDERS nodded. “I think we understand one another.”

  “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. A most attractive price. I think it will interest you.”

  “Try me.”

  “You asked about Kathleen Preston. You wanted to know if there was 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.”

  “Of course.”

  “And she was in love with you.”

  “I think so,” Vickers said. “I can’t be sure, 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.

  “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’s not just the physical eighteen—it’s the years ahead and the promise of those years and the wild, impractical dreaming and the love that walks beside you in the spring of life.”

  “Eighteen,” said Flanders. “Eighteen and immortality and Kathleen Preston, herself seventeen again.”

  “Kathleen?”

  Flanders nodded.

  “Just as it was before,” said Vickers. “But it won’t be the same, Flanders. Something that has slipped away.”

  “Just as it was before,” insisted Flanders. “As if all these years had never been.”

  XXXV

  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 they’d have mutant children and all of them would live a life such as the old pagan gods of Earth might have looked upon with envy.

  He threw back the covers and got out of bed and walked to the window. Standing there, he stated down at 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, pile them neatly in a corner and walk away and leave them. They could be erased from 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 hide.

  “You cannot sleep?” asked Hezekiah. “Perhaps there’s something I can do. A sleeping powder, perhaps, or . . .”

  “There is something you can do,” said Vickers. “There’s a record that I want to see.”

  “A record, sir?”

  “My family record. You must have it here somewhere.”

  “In the files, sir, I can get it right away, if you will 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 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, “I’ve been a fool too long. What about it, Ann? We’ve bantered and quarreled and we’ve used the bantering an
d the quarreling to cover the love that both of us have held. 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 birthright that was ours of living out our lives in the bodies 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 realization 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 mutant.”

  He’d go back to 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. Together, they would live out what was left to them of life. 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 little murmurings of a house at night, unnoticed in the daytime when it is filled with human sounds. And he thought the record would not tell the tale that he wished to know, would not tell 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 it with trembling fingers and it was there upon the page.

  Vickers, Jay, b. Aug . 5, 1937, it. 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 translated: “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.”

  “Thank you,” said Vickers.

  “A pleasure, sir.”

  He glanced at the line above and there he found the names, placed 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.

  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.”

  “Time sense?”

  “The other worlds. They are a matter of time, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know. Would you explain it, please?”

  “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.”

  “That’s right,” said Vickers. 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 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.

  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, but there would be no yesterday and no tomorrow. If you held a certain time sense, you could break out 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. It had simply been an aid.

  He went on with the line.

  “What is s.a., Hezekiah?”

  “Suspended animation, sir.”

  “My father and my mother?”

  “Waiting for the day when the mutants finally achieve immortality.”

  “But they died, Hezekiah!”

  “They would have died if they had been allowed to live. When there is that danger, mutants are kept in suspended animation until immortality becomes possible.”

  The room was bright and cold and naked with the monstrous nakedness of truth.

  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 her, sir.”

  “But you got the Preston family record!”

  Hezekiah shook his head again. “I searched the cross-index, sir. There is no Preston mentioned. No Preston anywhere.”

  XXXVI

  HE had made a decision and now the decision was no good—made impossible by the memory of two faces. He closed his eyes and remembered his mother, 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 all the others.

  The memory of his mother’s face and of his father’s hand upon his shoulder, with the fingers digging into his flesh with a manly tenderness—these were things no one could 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 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. He was one of those—and he knew he could not fail them.

  What kind of world? He tho
ught he knew.

  An immortal world that had all the factors necessary to make immortality workable—endless economic living room, endless opportunity, endless challenges to the best efforts of one’s being.

  Endless living room there was, even if one took only Earth into account, for there now lay open to Man’s possession that endless ring around the Sun.

  But there also would be the Galaxy, with all its solar systems, and each of these solar systems would have its following worlds as well. Take all the planets that there were and multiply them by infinity and you got a rough idea.

  Each world would be an opportunity and new techniques and new sciences would add to opportunity, so that Man, even eternal Man, need never fear the lack of opportunity or of challenge.

  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 birth rate were not large, even if new members of the tribe were discovered but infrequently, 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. Yet 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 certain persons died a dozen years too soon? Some of the knowledge, of course, would be recovered through the later work of others, 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 brain in which the first faint stirring of their development had just begun to ferment.