The Universe Maker

by A. E. van Vogt

  "About fifteen million."

  She spoke glibly but Cargill let the figure pass.

  "And the Tweeners?" he asked.

  "Three million or so." She was contemptuous. "The cowards live in cities."

  "What about the Shadows?"

  "A hundred thousand, maybe a little more or less. Not much."

  Cargill guessed that she could not possibly know that those figures were accurate. She didn't appear the type of person who would be well-informed on such matters. But she did provide a picture of the age, and it filled a gap in his knowledge. He visualized wilderness, a few cities, vast numbers of floaters prowling at random through the lower skies. He nodded half to himself, parted his lips, and began: "I gather that the Shadows rule the roost."

  "Nobody rules nobody," said Lela irritably. "And now, you've asked just about enough questions. You can mind your own business."

  She went out.

  Cargill was left alone most of the rest of the day. He saw Lela briefly again when she came in and prepared lunch for herself and her father.

  It was not till afternoon that he started to think seriously about what he had learned. The population collapse depressed him. It made the big fight of life seem suddenly less important. All the eager ambition of the twentieth century was now proved valueless, destroyed by a catastrophe that derived not from physical force, but apparently from a will to escape. Perhaps the pressures of civilization had been too great. People had fled from it as from a plague the moment a real opportunity arose.

  However, even in retrospect such a likelihood seemed improbable. Civilization had seemed so firmly entrenched. Scientifically, culturally, man had attained a high point indeed. Although his activities as a social animal left much to be desired, he was perpetually striving, seeking, learning. . . . Somewhere there must have been an intolerable rigidity, a basic falseness. By implication, from what the girl had said, Cargill guessed the answer: Authority had once more attained too great a position. In response, people had flung themselves away from a civilization that, more and more, told them that they knew nothing, that they must conform to patterns laid down for them by those who knew, or rather by those who had the legal right to know.

  Instinctively, they had tried to return to a state of being Cause instead of Effect. They had rejected the hierarchy of intellect which, ever frigid, never dynamic, sought always to impose restrictions. Men had fought up from a thousand dark ages, each time to meet the same blind control forces, each time to surrender for a while to a growing mass of chains; and then—taking alarm—struggling as blindly to escape.

  It seemed pretty disheartening to realize that it had happened again, to realize that the supersalesmen and the advertising executives, and the TV geniuses, and the Cadillacs and the Buicks and the Jaguars had not been able to maintain their glamor-hold. . . . Something had certainly been missing. Maybe it was the right to self-determination.

  The kitchen had grown dark when Cargill became aware of the ship sinking to a lower level. He didn't realize just how low until he heard the metal shell under him whisk against the upper branches of trees. A minute later there was a thud and then a shock. The floater dragged for several feet along the ground and came to a stop. Cargill grew conscious of a muffled roaring sound outside.

  Lela came into the room. Or rather, she walked straight through to the kitchen. Cargill had a sudden suspicion of what she planned to do and lurched to his feet. He was too late. The door of the engine room was open, and the girl was in, the act of lowering a section of the glass wall. As he watched she eased down a hinged section of the outer wall and stepped through, out of sight. A damp sea breeze blew into Cargill's face and now he heard the roar of the surf.

  The girl came back after about a minute and paused in his room. "You can go outside if you want," she said. She hesitated. Then, "Don't try to run away. You won't get far, and Pa might burn you with a spit gun."

  Cargill said ruefully, "Where would I run to? I guess you folks are stuck with me."

  He watched her narrowly to see how she took that. She seemed relieved. It was not a positive reaction but it was suggestive and fitted with his feeling that Lela Bouvy would welcome the presence of someone other than her father. As he hobbled through the kitchen a moment later, Cargill silently justified the plan he had of winning the girl's confidence. A prisoner in his situation was entitled to use .every trick and device necessary to his escape.

  He did not pause at the engine room door—how it opened, he would discover in the morning. He manipulated his chained legs down a set of steps—part of the outer wall, folded out and down on hinges. A moment later he stepped onto a sandy beach.

  They spent most of the evening catching crabs and other sea creatures that crowded around a light which Bouvy lowered into the water. It was a wild seacoast, rocky except for brief stretches of sand. In places, a primeval forest came down almost to the edge of the rock that overlooked the restless sea below. Lela scooped up the tiny creatures with a little net and tossed them onto a pile where Cargill with his fingers separated the wanted from the unwanted. It was easy to pick out and throw back the ones that Lela pointed out as inedible, to toss the others into a pail. Periodically, the girl took a pailful of the delicacies back to the floater.

  She was in a visible state of exhilaration. Her eyes flashed with excitement in the light reflections, her face was alive with color. Her lips parted, her nostrils dilated. Several times when Bouvy had moved farther from hearing she shrieked at Cargill, "Isn't it fun? Isn't this the life?"

  "Wonderful!" Cargill yelled back. Once he added, "I've never seen anything like it."

  That seemed to satisfy her and to a point it was true. There was a pleasure to open-air living. What she didn't seem to understand was that there was more to being alive than living outdoors. Civilized life had many facets, not just one.

  What concerned Cargill was the possibility that he might actually have to get used to this kind of existence. Indeed, it might be wise if he did. Here, in these free spaces, he might easily lose himself for a lifetime. Just what that would mean in terms of boredom, a sense of futility, he was not quite prepared to consider. At the moment, the prospect of such a limited life had frightening aspects.

  It was well after midnight before their activities ceased, and he was back in his cot, considering the events of the night. It struck him finally that the girl's actions had been most significant. Her seeking him out frequently, her attempt to convince him of the pleasures of floater life—they added up in very meaningful fashion; and he had had just enough experience with women to guess that she was lonely. Whether her goal included lovemaking, or rather, on what terms it would include love, depended on her upbringing. He surmised prudishness from the way she held herself. However, at the moment, he felt unprepared to take the preliminary actions necessary to overcome the resistance of the simple-minded girl.

  She came into his part of the ship a dozen times the next day. Cargill, who had unsuccessfully sought the secret of how to open the engine-room door, finally asked her how it was done. She showed him without hesitation. It was a matter of simultaneously touching both door jambs.

  When she had gone Cargill headed directly for the engine room, paused for a moment to study the engine —that proved a futile task, since it was completely closed in—and then slid the wall section into the floor and looked down at the ground beneath.

  The world that sped by below was a wilderness, but of a curious sort. As far as the eye could see were the trees and shrubery associated with land, almost untouched by the hand and metal of man. But standing amid weeds and forests were buildings. Even from a third of a mile up those that Cargill saw looked uninhabited. Brick chimneys lay tumbled over on faded roofs. Windows seen from a distance yawned emptily, or gazed up at him with a glassy stare. Barns sagged unevenly, and here and there the wood, or brick, or stone had completely collapsed, and the unpainted ruin drooped wearily to the ground.

  In the beginning the only str
uctures he saw were farmhouses and their outbuildings. But abruptly a town flowed by underneath. Now the effect of uninhabited desolation was clearly marked—tottering fences, cracked pavement overgrown by weeds, and the same design of disintegration in the houses. When they had passed over a second long-abandoned town Cargill closed the panel that had concealed the window and returned uneasily to his cot.

  Coming as he did from a world in which virtually every acre of tillable land was owned and used by somebody, he was shocked by the way vast areas had been allowed to revert to a primitive state. He tried to visualize from what the girl had told him and from what he had observed how the devastation might have happened. But that got him nowhere. He wondered if the development of machinery had finally made agriculture unnecessary. If it had, then this stretch of decay and disrepair were but signs of transition. The time would come when these ghost farms and ghost towns and perhaps ghost cities would return to the soil from which they had, in their complex fashion, sprung. The time would come when these costly monuments of an earlier civilization would be as gone and forgotten as the cities of antique times.

  Two more evenings were spent fishing. On the fourth day Cargill heard a woman's loud voice talking from the living room. It was an unpleasant voice and it startled him.

  Curiously, he hadn't previously thought of these people as being in communication with anyone else. But the woman was unmistakably giving instructions to the Bouvy father and daughter. Almost as soon as she had stopped talking Cargill felt the ship change its course. Toward dark Lela came in.

  "We'll be camping with other people tonight," she said. "So you watch yourself." She sounded fretful and she went out without waiting for him to reply.

  Cargill considered the possibilities with narrowed eyes. After four days of being in hobble chains, with no sign that they would ever come off, he was ready for a change. "All I've got to do," he told himself, "is catch two people off guard." And he wouldn't have to be gentle about it either. "Careful," he thought. "Better not build my hopes too high."

  Nevertheless, it seemed to him that the presence of other people might actually produce an opportunity for escape.

  6

  Through the open doorway Cargill caught a glimpse of the outside activity. Men walked by carrying fishing rods. The current of air that surged through brought the tangy odor of river and the damp pleasant smell of innumerable growing things.

  It grew darker rapidly. Finally, Cargill could stand his confinement no longer. He stood up and, taking care not to trip over his chain, went outside and sank down on the grass. The scene that spread before him had an idyllic quality. Here and there under the trees ships were parked. There were at least a dozen that he could see, and it seemed to him that the lights of still others showed through the thick foliage along the shore. The sound of voices floated on the air and somehow they no longer sounded harsh or crude.

  There was a movement in the darkness near him. Lela Bouvy settled down on the grass beside him. She said breathlessly, "Kind of fun living like this, isn't it?"

  Cargill hesitated and then, somewhat to his surprise, found himself inwardly agreeing. "There's a desire in all of us," he thought, "to return to nature." The will to relax, the impulse to lie on green grass, to listen to the rustling of leaves in an almost impalpable breeze—all that he could feel in himself. He also had the same basic urge that had driven these Planiacs to abandon the ordered slavery of civilization. He found himself saddened by the realization that the abandonment included a return to ignorance. He said aloud, "Yes, it's pretty nice."

  A tall powerful-looking woman strode out of the darkness. "Where's Bouvy?" she said. A flashlight in her hand winked on and glared at Lela and Cargill. Its bright stare held steady for seconds longer than was necessary. "Well, I'll be double darned," the woman's voice said from the intense blackness behind the light, "little Lela's gone and found herself a man."

  Lela snapped, "Don't be a bigger fool than you have to be, Carmean."

  The woman laughed uproariously. "I heard you had a man," she said finally, "and now that I get a look at him I can see you've done yourself proud."

  Lela said indifferently, "He doesn't mean a thing to me."

  "Yeah?" said Carmean derisively. Abruptly she seemed to lose interest. The beam of her flashlight swept on and left them hi darkness. The light focused on Pa Bouvy sitting in a chair against the side of the ship. "Oh, there you are," said the woman.

  "Yup!"

  The big woman walked over. "Get up and give me that chair," she said. "Haven't you got no manners?"

  "Watch your tongue, you old buzzard," said Bouvy pleasantly. But he stood up and disappeared into the ship. He emerged presently with another chair.

  During his absence the woman had picked up the chair in which he had been sitting and carried it some twenty-five feet down the river's bank.

  She yelled at Bouvy, "Bring that contraption over here! I want to talk to you privately. Besides, I guess maybe those two love-birds want to be alone." She guffawed.

  Lela said in a strained voice to Cargill, "That's Carmean. She's one of the bosses. She thinks she's being funny when she talks like that."

  Cargill said, "What do you mean, one of the bosses?"

  The girl sounded surprised. "She tells us what to do." She added hastily, "Of course, she can't interfere in our private life."

  Cargill digested that for a moment. During the silence he could hear Carmean's voice at intervals. Only an occasional word reached him. Several times she said, "Tweeners" and "Shadows." Once she said, "It's a cinch."

  There was an urgency in her voice that made him want to hear what she was saying, but presently he realized the impossibility of making sense out of stray words. He relaxed and said, "I thought you folks lived a free life—without anybody to tell you what to do and where to get off."

  "You got to have rules," said Lela. "You got to know where to draw the line. What you can do and what you can't do." She added earnestly, "But we are free. Not like those Tweeners in their cities." The last was spoken scornfully.

  Cargill said, "What happens if you don't do what she says?"

  "You lose the benefits."

  "Benefits?"

  "The preachers won't preach to you," said Lela.

  "Nobody gives you food. The Shadows won't fix your ship." She added casually, "And things like that."

  Cargill decided he wouldn't worry about the preachers. He had once had a conversation with an army chaplain before leaving the U.S. for the Far East. The man had attempted a very colloquial approach, referring to the possibility of "going West." Cargill recalled his own analogy that Stateside "West" ended at the Pacific Ocean, and that if he could still feel his feet wet after crossing that boundary, he would begin to believe that he'd better find out how warm the water could get.

  He considered most of the religious people he knew hypocrites. The implications of believing that one was a soul, or had one, were so numerous that anything short of acting on these implications made belief a mere protective coloring. Cargill knew of no one who showed by his actions that he believed himself to be an infinitely tenuous energy structure united to a material body.

  Lela's reference to not receiving food if they didn't conform puzzled him. He had had the impression that the Planiacs garnered their living from the streams and the seashore and the wilderness. They might not be provided a bountiful living the year round, but the marvellous refrigeration and cooking systems on the floaters made large accumulations possible at the harvest seasons. And that emphasized the one important restriction in what she had said. If the Shadows wouldn't fix the ships, that indeed could be disastrous. One might conclude that the solution was to learn to fix one's own ship. It was interesting that a large number of people would let themselves be so easily controlled. It indicated that it wasn't the material side that mattered, but the belief and attitudes of a group. These people, like so many before them, were the slaves of their own thoughts.

  Cargill said
at long last: "Why do the Shadows recognize the authority of Carmean and the other bosses?"

  "Oh, they just want us to behave."

  "But you can capture Tweeners?"

  The girl hesitated. Then, "Nobody seems to worry about a Tweener," she said.

  Cargill nodded. He recalled his attempts to get information from her during the past few days. Apparently she hadn't then thought of these restraining influences on her life. Now, though she seemed unaware of it, she had given him a picture of a rigid social structure. Surely, he thought desperately, he could figure out some way to take advantage of this situation. He moved irritably and the chain rattled, reminding him that all the plans in the world could not directly affect metal.

  Carmean, closely followed by Bouvy, brought her chair back to the ship. Setting the chair down, she walked slowly over and stood in front of Cargill. She half-turned and said, "I could use a husky guy around, Bouvy."

  "He isn't for sale." That was Lela, her voice curt.

  "I'm speaking to your Pa, kid, so watch your tongue."

  "You heard the girl," said Bouvy. "We've got a good man here." His tone was cunning, rather than earnest. He sounded as if he were prepared to haggle but wanted the best of the deal.

  Carmean said, "Don't you go getting commercial on me." She added darkly, "You'd better watch out. These Tweeners haven't got any religion when it comes to a good-looking girl."

  Bouvy grunted but when he spoke he still sounded good-humored. "Don't give me any of that. Lela's going to stick with her Pa and be a help to him all her life. Aren't you, honey?"

  "You talk like a fool, Pa. Better keep your mouth shut."

  "She's fighting hard," said Carmean slyly. "You can see what's in the back of her mind."

  Bouvy sat down in one of the chairs. "Just for the sake of the talk, Carmean," he said, "what'll you give for him?"

  Cargill had listened to the early stages of the transaction with a shocked sense of unreality. But swiftly now he realized that he was in process of being sold.