And he remembered Flanders, rocking on the porch and saying that distance should be no bar to telepathy, that a mile or a light-year should not make the slightest difference.
“You think I can?”
“I don’t know,” said Vickers. “You don’t want to walk, do you?”
“Not that far.”
“Then give it a try.”
They stood silently, looking toward the small area of light in the gathering darkness. He tried to pick out the different locations. There was where Rockefeller Center was located back on the old Earth, and up there Central Park and down there, where the East River curved in, the old abandoned United Nations structure. But the areas were covered with grass and trees instead of concrete and asphalt.
“Jay!” Her whisper was tense with excitement.
“Yes, Ann.”
“I think I have someone.”
“A man or a woman?”
“Good heavens, neither! He says he’s a robot! He says he’ll send someone—no, not someone—something for us.”
“Ann . . .”
“He says for us to wait right here. They’ll be right along.”
“Ann, ask him if they can make movies.”
“Movies?”
“Motion pictures. Have they got cameras and film?”
“But what do you . . .”
“Just go ahead and ask him.”
“He says they can.”
“That’s fine,” said Vickers. “But motion pictures?”
“I have an idea we can lick Crawford yet.”
“Oh, no, you aren’t going back!”
“You bet I am.”
“Jay Vickers, I won’t let you!”
“You can’t stop me,” Vickers said. “Here, let’s sit down and wait to be picked up.”
THEY sat down, close together.
“I have a story,” Vickers said. “It’s about a boy. His name was Jay Vickers and he was very young . . .” He stopped abruptly.
“Go on,” she said. “I’d like to hear your story.”
“Some other time.”
“I want to hear it now.”
“Not when a moon is coming up,” said Vickers. “That’s no time for stories.”
And he wondered: Can I ever tell her that We are closer than she thinks, that we came from the same life and will go back to the same body and that we cannot love one another?
She leaned against him and put her head against his shoulder and looked up at the sky.
“It’s getting clearer,” she said, “not so strange now. Queer as it may be, it seems right. This other world and the things we have, those strange abilities and all and the strange remembering.”
He put his arm around her and she turned her head and gave him a quick, impulsive kiss.
“We’ll be happy,” she said. “The two of us in this new world.”
And now, he knew, he could never tell her.
XLVIII
A GIRL’S voice answered the telephone and Vickers asked for Crawford.
“Mr. Crawford is in conference,” she said’. “He cannot be disturbed.”
“Tell him this is Vickers.”
“Mr. Crawford cannot be . . . Did you say Vickers? Jay Vickers?”
“That’s right. I have news for him.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Vickers.”
He waited, wondering how long he might have, for the analyzer in the phone booth must have sounded the alarm and the exterminator squad must be on the way.
Crawford’s voice said, “Hello, Vickers.”
“Call off your dogs,” said Vickers. “They’re wasting your time and theirs.”
He heard the rage in Crawford’s voice. “I thought I told you—”
“Take it easy. You haven’t got a chance of potting me. Your men couldn’t do it when they had me cornered. So if you can’t kill me, you better dicker with me.”
“Dicker?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Listen, Vickers, I’m not—”
“Of course you will,” said Vickers. “That other world business is really rolling now and you are getting hurt. It’s time you talked sense.”
“I’m tied up with my directors,” Crawford said.
“That’s fine. They’re the ones I really want to talk to.”
“Vickers, no matter what you’re planning, you’ll never get away with it. You can’t leave here alive. I can’t save you if you keep up this foolishness.”
“I’m not going away.”
“I like you, Vickers. I don’t know why. I certainly have no reason to . . .”
“I’m coming up.”
“All right,” said Crawford wearily. “Do what you want. It’s your funeral.”
Vickers picked up the film case and stepped out of the booth. An elevator car was waiting and he walked swiftly toward it, shoulders hunched a little against the anticipated bullet in the back. “Third floor,” he said.
The elevator operator didn’t bat an eye. The analyzer by no must have given its signal, but more than likely the operator had his instructions on third floor passengers.
VICKERS opened the door to North American Research and Crawford was waiting for him in the reception room.
“Come on,” said Crawford He turned and marched ahead and Vickers followed him down the long hall. He looked at his watch and did fast mental arithmetic. It was going better than he’d hoped. He still had a margin of two or three minutes. It hadn’t taken as long to convince Crawford as he had thought it might.
Ann would be calling in ten minutes. What happened in that time would decide success or failure.
Crawford stopped in front of the door at the end of the hall.
“You know what you are doing, Vickers?”
Vickers nodded.
“One slip and . . .” Crawford made a hissing sound between his teeth and sliced a finger across his throat.
“I understand,” said Vickers.
“Those men in there are the desperate ones. There still is time to leave. I won’t tell them you were here.”
“Cut out the stalling, Crawford.”
“What have you got there?”
“Some documentary film. It will help explain what I have to say. You’ve got a projector inside?”
Crawford nodded. “But no operator.”
“I’ll run the machine myself.”
“A deal?”
“A solution,” Vickers said.
“All right, then. Come in.”
The shades were drawn and the room was twilit and the long table at which the men sat seemed to be no more than a row of white faces turned toward them.
Vickers followed Crawford across the room, feet sinking into the heavy carpeting. He looked at the men around the table and saw that many of them were public figures.
There, at Crawford’s right hand, was a banker, and beyond him a man who had often been called to the White House to be entrusted semi-diplomatic missions. And there were others also that he recognized, although there were many that he didn’t, and a few of them wore the strange dress of other lands.
Here was the directorate of North American Research, those men who guided the destiny of the embattled normals against the mutant menace—Crawford’s desperate men.
“A strange thing has happened, gentlemen,” said Crawford. “A most unusual thing. We have a mutant with us.”
IN the silence, the white faces flickered around at Vickers, then turned back again.
“Mr. Vickers,” Crawford went on, “is an acquaintance of some standing. You will recall that we have talked of him before. At one time, we hoped he might be able to help us reconcile the differences between the two branches of the human race.
“He comes to us of his own accord and has indicated to me that he may have a possible solution. He has not told me what that solution might be. I brought him directly here. It’s up to you, of course, whether you want to hear what he has to say.”
“Why, certainly,” said one o
f them. “Let the man talk.”
And another said, “Most happy to.”
The others nodded their agreement.
Crawford said to Vickers, “The floor is yours.”
Vickers walked to the table’s head and he was thinking: So far, so good. Now if only the rest works out. If I don’t make a slip. If I can carry it off. Because it was win or lose; there was no middle ground.
He set the film case on the table and said, “No infernal weapon, gentlemen. It’s a film that, with your permission, I’ll show you in just a little while.”
They simply sat and looked at him and there was nothing that you could read in their faces, but he felt the coldness of their hatred.
“You’re about to start a war,” he said. “You’re meeting here to decide if you should reach out and turn on the tap . . .”
The white faces seemed to be leaning forward, all of them straining toward him.
One of them said: “You’re either a brave man, Vickers, or an absolute idiot.”
“I’ve come here,” said Vickers, “to end the war before it starts.”
REACHING into his pocket, Vickers’ hand came out in a flicking motion and tossed the thing it held onto the table.
“That’s a top,” he said. “A thing that kids play with—or used to play, at any rate. I want to talk to you for a minute about a top.”
“A top?” raged someone. “Is he trying to make fools of us?” But the banker across the table said reminiscently, “I had a top like that when I was a boy. They don’t make them any more. I haven’t seen one of them in years.”
He reached out a hand and picked up the top and spun it on the table. The others craned their necks to look at it.
Vickers glanced at his watch. Still on schedule. Now if nothing spoiled it!
“You remember the top, Crawford?” asked Vickers. “The one that was in my hotel room that night you unexpectedly dropped in on me?”
“I remember it,” said Crawford.
“You spun it and it vanished.”
“And it came back again.”
“Crawford, why did you spin that top?”
Crawford licked his lips in embarrassment. “Why, I don’t know. It might have been an attempt to rescue a lost memory, an urge to be a boy again.”
“You asked me what the top was for.”
“You told me it was for going into fairyland and I told you that a week before I would have said that we were crazy—you for saying a thing like that and I for listening to you.”
“But before I came in, you spun the top. Tell me, Crawford, why did you do it?”
“Go ahead,” the banker urged. “Tell him.”
“I did,” said Crawford. “I just told you the reason.”
Behind Vickers, a door opened. He turned his head and saw a secretary beckoning to Crawford.
ON time, Vickers thought.
Working like a charm. Ann was on the phone and Crawford was being called from the room to talk to her. And that was the way he’d planned it, for with Crawford in the room, the plan would be hopeless.
“Mr. Vickers,” the banker said, “I’m curious about this business of the top. What connection is there between a top and the problem that we face?”
“A sort of analogy,” replied Vickers. “There are certain basic differences between the normals and the mutants and I can explain them best by the use of a top. But before I do, I’d like you to see my film. After that I can go ahead and tell you and you will understand me. If you gentlemen will excuse me?”
He lifted the film case from the table.
“Why, certainly,” the banker said. “Go right ahead.”
Vickers went back to the stairs which led to the projection booth, opened the door and went inside.
He’d have to work fast and surely, for Ann could not hold Crawford on the phone very long and she had to keep Crawford out of the room for at least five minutes.
He slid the film into the folder and threaded it through the lenses with shaking fingers and clipped it on the lower spool and then swiftly checked what he had done.
Everything seemed all right.
He found the switches and turned them on and the cone of light sprang out to spear above the conference table. On the screen before the table was a brilliantly colored top, spinning, with the stripes moving up and disappearing, moving up and disappearing—
The film track said: “Here you see a top, a simple toy, but it presents one of the most baffling illusions . . .”
The words were right, Vickers knew. Robotic experts had spent days picking out the right words, weaving them together, with just the right relationship, just the right inflection, to give them maximum semantic value. The words would hold the audience, fix their interest on the top, and keep it there after the first few seconds.
He came silently down the stairs and moved over to the door. If Crawford should come back, he could hold him off until the job was done.
THE film track said: “Now if you will watch closely, you will see that the lines of color seem to move up the body of the top and disappear. A child, watching the lines of color, might wonder where they went, and so might anyone . . .”
He tried to count the seconds off and the seconds dragged.
The film track said: “Watch closely now—watch closely. They come up and disappear, they come up and disappear—”
There were not nearly so many men at the table, only two or three now, and they were watching so closely that they had not even noticed the others disappear. Maybe those two or three would stay. Of them all, these few might be the only ones who weren’t unsuspecting mutants.
Vickers opened the door softly and slid out and closed it behind him.
The door shut out the soft persuasive voice of the film tract: “Come up and disappear—watch closely—come up and . . .”
Crawford was coming down the hall, lumbering along.
He saw Vickers and stopped.
“What do you want?” he asked. “What are you out here for?”
“A question,” Vickers said, “one you didn’t answer in there. Why did you spin that top?” Crawford shook his head. “I can’t understand it, Vickers. It doesn’t make any sense, but I went into fairyland once myself. Just like you, when I was a kid. I remembered it after I talked to you. Maybe because I talked to you. I sat on the floor and watched the top spin and wondered where the stripes were going—you know how they come up and disappear and then another one comes up and disappears. I wondered where they went and I got so interested that I must have followed them, because all at once I was in fairyland and there were a lot of flowers and I picked one. When I got back again, I still had the flower and that’s the way I knew I’d been in fairyland. You see, it was winter and there were no flowers and when I showed it to Mother . . .”
“That’s enough,” Vickers interrupted elatedly. “That is all I need.”
Crawford stared at him. “You don’t believe me?”
“I do.”
It hadn’t been Ann Carter, after all! Flanders and he and Crawford—they were the three who had been given life from the body of Jay Vickers!
And Ann?
Ann had within her the life of that girl who had walked the valley with him—the girl he remembered as Kathleen Preston, but who had some other name. For Ann remembered the valley and that she had walked the valley in the springtime with someone by her side.
There might be more than Ann.
There might be three of Ann just as there were three of him, but that didn’t matter, either. Maybe Ann’s name really was Ann Carter as his really was Jay Vickers. Maybe that meant that, when the lives drained back into the rightful bodies, it would be his consciousness and Ann’s that would survive.
And it was all right now to love Ann. She was a separate person and not a part of him.
Ann had come into this world to place a telephone call and to get Crawford from the room, so that he would not recognize the danger of the top spinning on screen, and
now she’d gone back to the other world again and the threat was gone.
“Everything’s all right,” said Vickers. “Everything’s just fine.”
Soon he’d be going back himself and Ann would be waiting for him. And they’d be happy, the way she had said they’d be, sitting there on a Manhattan hilltop waiting for the robots.
“Well, then,” said Crawford, “let’s go back in again.”
Vickers put out his hand to stop him. “There’s no use going in.”
“No use?”
“Your directors aren’t there,” said Vickers. “They’re in the second world. The one, you remember, that the Pretentionists preached about in the squares all over town.”
CRAWFORD stared at him. “The top!”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll start again,” said Crawford: “Another board, another . . .”
“You haven’t got the time. This Earth is done. The people are fleeing from it. Even those who stay won’t listen to you, won’t fight for you.”
“I’ll kill you,” Crawford said. “I’ll kill you, Vickers.”
“No, you won’t.”
They stood face to face silently, tensely.
“No,” said Crawford. “No, I guess I won’t. I should, but I can’t. Why can’t I kill you, Vickers?”
Vickers touched the big man’s arm.
“Come on, friend,” he said softly. “Or should I call you brother?”
—CLIFFORD D. SIMAK
THE FISHERMAN
First of Four Parts. If Science is the cultural hero today . . . what happens if Science, just once, fails the Superman role? How do people react, when the Hero slips a little . . .?
FINALLY there came a time when Man was ready to admit that he was barred from space. He had first suspected it in that day when Van Allen found the radiation belts that encircled Earth and the men at Minnesota used balloons to trap the solar protons. But Man had dreamed so long that even in the face of this he could not forsake the dream without giving it a try.
So he went ahead and tried—and he kept on trying even after astronauts had died to prove he couldn’t do it. Man was too frail for space. He died too easily. He died either of the primary radiations hurled out by the sun or of the secondaries to which the metal of his ship gave birth.
The Complete Serials Page 58
