New Folks' Home: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  First, there had been the Buttonholer who had collared him; then Lucinda Silone who had wished a dream of dignity and peace; and after that, Lew Giesey, dead behind his battered desk—and finally the man who had spent five hundred years in a culture that had not discovered profit.

  “But Farris …”

  “Paul Farris is a friend of mine.”

  “He is no one’s friend.”

  “Just like that,” said Blaine, thrusting out two fingers, pressed very close together.

  “I’d be careful just the same.”

  “Since this afternoon, Farris and I are conspiratorial pals. We are in a deal together; Giesey died …”

  “I know. What has that to do with this sudden friendship?”

  “Before he died, Giesey put an appointment through. I’m moving up to Records.”

  “Oh, Norm. I’m so glad!”

  “I had hoped you’d be.”

  “Then what is it all about?” she asked. “Tell me what is going on. Who was that man the goons dragged out of here?”

  “I told you—they weren’t goons.”

  “Who was the man. Don’t try to duck the question.”

  “An escapee. A man who ran away from Center.”

  “And you were helping him.”

  “Well, no …”

  “Norm, why should anyone want to escape from Center? Have you got folks locked up?”

  “This one was an awakened suspendee …”

  He knew he’d said too much, but it was too late. He saw the glint in her eyes—the look he’d grown to know. “It’s not a story,” he said. “If you use this …”

  “That’s what you think.”

  “This was in confidence.”

  “Nothing’s in confidence; you can’t talk to News in confidence.”

  “You’d just be guessing.”

  “You’d better tell me now,” she said. “I can find out, anyhow.”

  “That old gag!”

  “You may as well go ahead and tell me. It’ll save me a lot of trouble, and you’ll know I have it straight.”

  “Not another word.”

  “All right, smart guy,” she said.

  She stood on tiptoe, kissed him swiftly, then ducked away.

  “Harriet!” he cried, but she had stepped back into the shadow of the shrubbery and was gone. He took a quick step forward, then halted. There was no use going after her. He could never find or catch her, for she knew the gardens and the woods that stretched between their houses full as well as he did.

  Now he’d let himself in for it. By morning, the story would be in the papers.

  He knew that Harriet had meant exactly what she said. Damn the woman. Fanatical, he told himself. Why couldn’t she see things in their right perspective? Her loyalty to Communications was utterly fantastic.

  And yet it was no more so than Norman Blaine’s to Dreams. What had the commentator said when he’d been driving home? The unions were building up their strength, and it was this very fanatic loyalty—his to Dreams, Harriet’s to Communications—which was the basis of that growing strength.

  He stood in the puddle of light before the door and shivered at the thought of the story with 96-point headlines screaming from Page One.

  Not a breath of scandal, he had said that afternoon. For Dreams was built on public confidence; any hint of scandal would bring it tumbling down. And here was scandal—or something that could be made to sound very much like scandal.

  There were two things he could do. He could try to stop Harriet—how, he did not know. Or he could unmask this intrigue for what it really was—a plot to eliminate Dreams in the struggle for power, a move in that Central Labor struggle about which the commentator had held forth so pontifically.

  Now Blaine was sure that he knew how it all tied up, was sure that he could trace the major plot-lines that ran through these fantastic happenings. But if he meant to prove what he suspected, he didn’t have much time. Harriet was already off on a hunt for the facts of which he’d given her a hint. Perhaps she’d not have them for the morning editions, but by evening the story would be broken.

  And before that happened, Dreams must have its story to combat the flying rumors.

  There was one fact he had to verify. A man should know his history, Blaine told himself. It should not be a thing to be looked up in books, but carried in one’s head, a ready tool for use.

  Lucinda Silone had said she was Education and she would have told the truth. That was something which could be checked, one of the facts that would be checked automatically. Spencer Collins was Education, too. A professor of sociology, he had said, who had evolved a theory.

  There was something in the history of the guilds concerning Dreams and Education, something about a connection that had once existed between them—and it might apply.

  He went swiftly up the walk and through the hall, trudging down the hall to the study, with Philo following after. He thumbed up the switch and went quickly to the shelves. He ran a finger along a row of books until he found the one he wanted.

  At the desk, he turned on the lamp and ran quickly through the pages. He found what he wanted—the fact he’d known was there, read long ago and forgotten, dimmed out by the years of never being needed.

  X

  Farris’ house was surrounded by a great metallic wall, too high to jump, too smooth to climb. A guard was posted at the gate and another at the door.

  The first guard frisked Blaine; the second demanded identification. When he was satisfied, he called a robot to take the visitor to Farris.

  Paul Farris had been drinking. The bottle on the table beside his chair was better than half empty. “You took your time in coming,” he growled.

  “I got busy.”

  “Doing what, my friend?”

  Farris pointed at the bottle. “Help yourself. There are glasses in the rack.”

  Blaine poured out liquor until the glass was almost full. He said casually, “Giesey was murdered, wasn’t he?”

  The liquor in Farris’ glass slopped slightly, but there was no other sign. “The verdict was suicide.”

  “There was a glass on the desk,” said Blaine. “He’d just had a drink out of the carafe; there was poison in the water.”

  “Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”

  “And you’re covering up for someone.”

  “Could be,” Farris said. “Could be, too, it’s none of your damn business.”

  “I was just thinking. Education …”

  “What’s that!”

  “Education has been carrying a knife for us for a long time now. I looked up the history of it. Dreams started as a branch of Education, a technique for learning while you were asleep. But we got too big for them, and we got some new ideas—a thousand years ago. So we broke away, and …”

  “Now, wait a minute; say that slow, again.”

  “I have a theory.”

  “You have a head, too, Blaine. A good imagination. That’s what I said this afternoon; you think standing.”

  Farris lifted his glass and emptied it in a single gulp. “We’ll stick the knife into them,” he said, dispassionately. “Clear up to their gizzard.”

  Still dispassionately, he hurled the glass against the wall. It exploded into dust. “Why the hell couldn’t someone have thought of that to start with? It would have made it simple … Sit down, Blaine. I think we got it made.”

  Blaine sat down and suddenly was sick—sick at the realization that he had been wrong. It was not Education which had engineered the murder. It had been Paul Farris—Farris and how many others? For no one man—even with the organization the goon leader had at his command—could have worked on a thing like this alone.

  “One thing I want to know,” said Farris. “How did you get that appointment? You
didn’t get it the way you said; you weren’t meant to get it.”

  “I found it on the floor; it fell off Giesey’s desk.”

  There was no need of lying any longer, of lying or pretending. There was no further need of anything; the old pride and loyalty were gone. Even as Norman Blaine thought about it, the bitterness sank deeper into his soul; the futility of all the years was a torture grate that rasped across raw flesh.

  Farris chuckled. “You’re all right,” he said. “You could have kept your mouth shut and made it stick. It takes guts to do a thing like that. We can work together.”

  “It still is sticking,” Blaine told him sharply. “Take it away from me if you think you can.”

  This was sheer bravado and bitterness, a feeble hitting back, and Blaine wondered why he did it, for the job meant nothing now.

  “Take it easy,” Farris said. “You’re keeping it. I’m glad it worked out as it did. I didn’t think you had it in you, Blaine; I guess that I misjudged you.”

  He reached for the bottle. “Hand me another glass.”

  Blaine handed him another glass and Farris filled both. “How much do you know?”

  Blaine shook his head. “Not too much. This business of the dream substitution …”

  “You hit it on the head,” said Farris; “that’s the core of it. We’d had to fill you in before too long, so I might as well fill you in right now.”

  He settled back comfortably in his chair. “It started long ago, and it has been carried on with tight security for more than seven hundred years. It had to be a long-range project, you understand, for few dreams last less than a hundred years and many last much longer. At first, the work was carried on slowly and very cautiously; in those days, the men in charge had to feel their way along. But in the last few hundred years it has been safe to speed it up. We’ve worked through the greater part of the program first laid out, and are taking care of some of the supplementary angles that have been added since. Less than another hundred years and we will be ready—we could be ready any time, but we’d like to wait another hundred years. We have worked up techniques from what we’ve already done that are plain impossible to believe. But they’ll work; we have firsthand evidence that they are workable.”

  Blaine was cold inside, cold with the shock of disillusion.

  “All the years,” he said.

  Farris laughed. “You’re right. All the years. And all the others thought that we were lily pure. We were at pains to make them think we were; such quiet people. We were quiet from the very start, while the others bunched their muscles, shouted. One by one they learned the lesson we had known from the very first—that you keep your mouth shut, that you do not show your strength. You wait until the proper time.”

  “The others learned, eventually. They took their lessons hard, but they finally learned the facts of politics—too late. Even before there was a Central Union, Dreams saw what was coming and planned. We sat quietly in the corner and kept our hands neatly folded in our laps; we bowed our heads a little and kept our eyes half closed—a pose of utter meekness. Most of the time, the others didn’t even know that we were around. We are so small and quiet, you see. Everyone is watching Communications or Transportation or Food or Fabrication, because they are the big boys. But they should be watching Dreams, for Dreams is the one that has it.”

  “Just one thing,” said Blaine. “Two things, maybe. How do you know the substitute dreams run true? All the genuine ones we make are pure fantasy; they couldn’t really happen the way we fabricate them.”

  “That,” Farris told him, “is the one thing that has us on the ropes. When we can explain that one, we’ll have everything. Back at the beginning there were experiments. Dreams tried it out on their own personnel—ones who volunteered, for short periods, five years or ten. And the dreams didn’t come out the way they were put in.

  “When you give a dream a logical basis, instead of wish-fulfillment factors, it follows the lines of logic. When you juggle cultural factors, the patterns run true—well, maybe not true, but different than you thought they would. When you feed in illogic, you get a jumble of illogic; but when you feed in logic, the logic takes over and it shapes the dream. Our study of logic dreams leads us to believe that they follow lines of true development. Unforeseen trends show up, governed by laws and circumstances we could not have guessed—and those trends work out to logical conclusions.”

  There was fear in the man—a fear that must have lain deep in the minds of many men throughout seven hundred years. “Is it just pretend? Or do those dreams actually exist? Are there such other worlds somewhere? And if they are, do we create them? Or do we merely tap them?”

  “How do you know about the dreams?” asked Blaine. “The Sleepers wouldn’t tell you; if they did, you couldn’t believe …”

  Farris laughed. “That’s the easy part. We have a two-way helmet. A feed-in to establish the pattern and to set up the factors, a sort of introduction to set the dream going. It operates for a brief period, then cuts out and the dream is on its own. But we have a feed-back built into the helmet, and the dream is put on tape. We study it as it comes in; we don’t have to wait. We have stacks of tape. We have at our fingertips the billions of factors that go into many thousand different cultures. We have a history of the never-was, and of the might-have-been, and perhaps the yet-to-come.”

  Dreams is the one that has it, he had said. They had stacks of tape from seven hundred years of dreams. They had millions of man-hours experience—first-hand experience—in cultural patterns that had never happened. Some of them could not have happened; others of them might have come within a hair-breadth of happening—and there were many of them, perhaps, that could be made to happen.

  From those tapes they had learned lessons outside the curriculum of human experience. Economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, psychology—in all facets of human effort they held all the trumps. They could pull out economic dazzlers to blind the people; they could employ political theory that would be sure to win hands down; they had psychological tricks that would stop all the other unions dead.

  They’d played dumb for years sitting meekly in the corner, hands folded in their lap, being very quiet. And all the time they had been fashioning a weapon for use at its proper time.

  And the dedication, Blaine thought, the human dedication. The pride and comfort of a job well done. The warmth of accomplishment and service—the close human fellowship.

  For years the tapes had rolled, recording the feed-back, while men and women—who had come in trusting confidence to seek fairylands of their imagination—plodded drearily through logic dreams that were utterly fantastic.

  Farris’ voice had gone on and on and now it came back to him.

  “ … Giesey was going soft on us. He wanted to replace Roemer with someone who would see it his way. And he picked you, Blaine—of all men, he picked you.”

  He laughed again, uproariously. “It does beat hell how mistaken one can be.”

  “Yes, it does,” agreed Blaine.

  “So we had to kill him before the appointment could go through; but you beat us to it, Blaine. You’re a fast man on your feet. How did you know about it? How did you know what to do?”

  “Never mind.”

  “The timing,” said Farris. “The timing was perfect.”

  “You’ve got it all doped out.”

  Farris nodded. “I talked to Andrews. He’ll go along; he doesn’t like it, of course, but there’s nothing he can do.”

  “You’re taking a long chance, Farris, telling me all this.”

  “Not a chance; you are one of us. You can’t get out of it. If you say a word, you wreck the guild—and you won’t have a chance to say a word. From this moment, Blaine, there’s a gun against your back; there’ll be someone watching all the time.

  “Don’t try to do it, Blaine; I like you. I like the way
you operate. That Education angle is pure genius. You play along with us, and it’ll be worth your while. There’s nothing you can do but play along with us; you’re in it, clear up to your chin. As the head of Records, you have custody of all the evidence, and you can’t write off that fact … Go on, man; finish up that drink.”

  “I’d forgotten it,” said Blaine.

  He flicked the glass and the liquor splashed out, into Farris’ face. As if it were the same motion, Blaine’s fingers left the glass, let it drop, and reached for the liquor bottle.

  Paul Farris came to his feet, blinded, hands clawing at his face. Blaine rose with him, bottle arcing, and his aim was good. The bottle crashed on the goon leader’s skull and the man went down upon the carpeting, with snakes of blood oozing through his hair.

  For a second Norman Blaine stood there. The room and the man upon the floor suddenly were bright and sharp, each feature of the place and the shape upon the carpeting burning themselves into his consciousness. He lifted his hand and saw that he still grasped the bottle’s neck with its jagged, broken edges. He hurled it from him and ran, hunched against the expected bullet, straight toward the window. He leaped and rolled himself into a ball even as he leaped, arms wrapped around his face. He crashed into the glass, heard the faint ping of its explosion, and then was through and falling.

  He lit on the gravel path and rolled until thick shrubbery stopped him, then crawled swiftly toward the wall. But the wall was smooth, he remembered—not one to be climbed. Smooth and high and with only one gate. They would hunt him down and kill him. They’d shake him out like a rabbit in a brushpile. He didn’t have a chance.

  He didn’t have a gun and he’d not been trained to fight. All that he could do was hide and run; even so, he couldn’t get away, for there wasn’t much to hide in and there wasn’t far to run. But I’m glad I did it, he told himself.

  It was a blow against the shame of seven hundred years, a re-assertion of the old, dead dedication. The blow should have been struck long ago; it was useless now, except as a symbol that only Norman Blaine would know.

  He wondered how much such symbolism might count in this world around him.