“Ah,” he said and thumped back with an elbow so that his chair’s arm would pour him a glass of water. “But you don’t need glasses to talk to people.”
“I never talk to people. I never talk to anybody except my wife and I don’t talk to her and she doesn’t listen to me any more than I listen to her. She never says three words a week to me anyway.” Which is the way things should be, of course.
“What, may I ask, is your business?”
“You’ve got a nerve to ask, but for your information I haven’t got any business. I retired off my farm about four years ago and I haven’t spent a happy hour since.”
“Ah,” he said.
“Don’t sit there saying ‘Ah’ like an idiot,” I said. “Get busy and fit me with a pair of glasses.”
“You haven’t said why you needed them. You can have them of course, but to give them to you I’ll have to know just what sort of glasses you mean. What convinced you that you should have them?”
I could see that I had scared Dr. Flerry into being polite to me, so I told him that I had seen a pair of legs without a torso and had first missed and then seen one of the Medical Center domes and how that crazy college student had run right through me.
Well, if Dr. Flerry hadn’t stopped laughing when he did I guess we would have mixed it up right then.
“What’s so funny?” I demanded.
“Why, my dear fellow,” said Dr. Flerry, “you don’t need any glasses. If you ever paid any attention to the newspapers or the televisors or talked to anyone, you’d understand what is happening.”
“And what,” said I, “is happening?”
“Why, my dear fellow, is it possible that you haven’t heard of the Messiah?”
“Him,” I said. “What about him?”
“Would you care to come around to our meeting tonight? You might be edified.”
“I don’t like meetings. I don’t believe in meetings.”
“But my dear fellow, the Messiah will—”
“I don’t believe in messiahs.”
“Well, however that may be, I wonder at you. You are probably the only man in the world today who is not a follower. Let me explain to you what this is all about so that—”
“I don’t want to know anything about it and I wouldn’t believe it if I did.”
“Nevertheless, let me tell you something of this. The Messiah from Arcturus Arcton is teaching the nonexistence of matter. You see, by that he means that all matter is an idea. And it is high time that the world was relieved from the crushing load of materialism which has almost quenched the soul of man. Those are his words. And it’s true. Man is being pushed all around by machines and the age of machines has been over for a century, but the machines just keep running, and man, because he is so lazy, keeps using them. Now it may surprise you that a man such as myself, dependent upon the ills of the body as I am, should advocate the loss of the body. But I get no real interest out of my trade, for everything about the body is known except, of course, the soul and the Messiah has a good line on that. Further, in common with the rest of humanity, I am bored. I am so bored that I welcome any diversion. And I know that all this material world and this body I drag around are useless sources of annoyance.
“Now the Messiah is teaching us the folly of belief. So long as we believe in this world, this Universe, in machines and ills and mankind, then mankind shall survive and the world, the Universe and machines shall survive. But as soon as we lose all belief in these things, then we shall be freed. We shall be freed, my friend, from the agony caused by machines and other men. And, being slaves to cogwheels, the only answer is to abolish the very matter from which those same cogwheels and these bodies are made. Well! Matter does not really exist, you know. It is only a figment of our imaginations. We believe in matter and so there is matter. That, my dear fellow, is the glorious message you have missed by not listening or reading.”
“You mean,” I said, “that everybody belongs to this?”
“Certainly. Hasn’t the whole world been miserable ever since all further advance was unattainable? And isn’t this the one answer to our misery?”
“But … but where will everyone go?” I said.
“Why, we return to our proper position as a compound idea. And there we shall have nothing that is miserable or worrying—”
“But you won’t even exist!”
“Certainly not,” he said with a tired smile. And he nudged with his elbow and tilted his head back while his chair’s arm poured another glass of water down his throat. Languidly then he nodded to me.
“You don’t need glasses, my dear fellow. You are only witnessing the fruits of our combined disbelief. Several people happened to disbelieve that dome and then the college student probably didn’t believe in his Swishabout, and you, about to be killed by it, refused to believe in it either. So come around to our meeting tonight and hear all about it. It is really quite fascinating.” He yawned in boredom and pushed a pedal which shot my sofa car out to the Eye Level again.
I stepped on a down bucket. Wouldn’t it be awful, I thought, if this bucket didn’t exist? But it evidently still did and nothing happened until I was being speeded home on the conveyers.
The Trans-System 5:15 Local roared away from its field to the north and when it had attained the zenith it suddenly vanished. There wasn’t so much as a puff of smoke left in the sky. And about ten seconds later it appeared again fifty or sixty miles up, visible because of its exhaust flames in the dusk.
When I got home I went to bed behind a locked door. The bed, at least, showed no sign of vanishing. And if things were going to persist in refusing to exist, I vowed I wouldn’t leave that room until my condensochow and my stock of Old Space Ranger gave out.
I went out three times in three weeks and twice I came back so badly unnerved that again I barricaded myself. For the things which were happening clearly showed that the world had gone completely mad and maybe not only the world but the Universe as well. I recalled a fragment of talk I had heard concerning the disease machine madness, and I was now convinced that the disease had invaded everyone. And that it was even invading me.
My wife hadn’t spoken to me for so long that one day when she stuck her head in the door and announced that a gentleman was here to see me, I noticed for the first time that all was not well with her. She had a sort of ecstatic fixity about her face that could not even be broken by animosity toward me.
The gentleman came in. He had a robe of blue flashtex wrapped around him so that he was mostly hypnotic eyes. He said, “My name is George Smiley. I am called the Messiah!”
I must admit that I was never so close to being frightened in my life. He brought down his arm a little and exposed his face and if I have ever in my life seen anything sardonic it was the grin he wore. He was not handsome nor tall, but there was some kind of presence to him which would have singled him out from a million made up exactly like him.
“What do you want with me?” I said.
“I merely wish to speak with you.”
“Then go ahead,” I said.
“A Dr. Flerry, Number 483,936,3297,024AG, has reported to me that you may be the one responsible for the way things are progressing. We have done away with the disbelief of some thousands like you and you are the last one. I understand that you have neither heard nor read of the Great Eclipse.”
I couldn’t look him in the eyes and so I watched the way his flashtex cape rippled. “All I know is what Dr. Flerry told me.”
“And still you were not interested enough to attempt to believe with the rest?”
“Why should I be interested?” I said.
“Because this vitally concerns your happiness. Have you no wish to defeat the mechanism and organization which has enslaved mankind? Have you no desire to liberate yourself from the toils of a miserable existence?”
�
��I can do that with a splashgun,” I said. “I don’t have to believe in you to do it.”
“Ah! And there you are wrong. If you kill yourself, you will not share. Is there no way to convince you that our precepts are the only precepts?”
“I can grow cabbage,” I said. “And I can milk cows. And I have stayed healthy so far by not listening to anybody on the subject of anything. You are wasting your time with me.”
“You mean you refuse?”
“I guess that’s what I mean.”
“You are a very stubborn man.”
“I believe what I want to believe. I believe this is a world. And anybody that tries to tell me that this glass and bottle are not real is going to get an awful argument from me.”
“Then,” said George Smiley, the Messiah, “my hand is forced. I sent no minions. I came myself. You are the last man. I and the rest of the Universe shall cease to believe in your soul and you shall cease to exist. Good day.”
“Good day,” I said.
He looked back once from the door. I was trying to pour myself a drink but the bottle neck chattered against the glass and the Old Space Ranger spilled. I felt his eyes.
And then there weren’t a bottle and a glass in my hands!
I held nothing!
“Good day,” he said again in a cheerful voice. He was gone.
During the remainder of that day I did nothing more than sit and look at the patterns in the fluffoplex floor. I was half angry, half scared, and I was trying my best to understand just what George Smiley, the Messiah, was doing. I have been told that I have a suspicious nature. However that may be, I suspected George Smiley. Every person I had seen for weeks, now that I came to think about it, had had that same strange fixity of expression which my wife had borne; just as though everyone had become a saint.
It was much against my principles to surrender to the extent of examining the problem but, at last, when night—as I thought—had come, I went into the next room and fumbled around until I found what papers my wife had accumulated during the past month or two. I sat and read, then, for nearly two hours.
But at the end of that time I was not even close to a solution. All I discovered was that George Smiley had come from Arcton with a message. Of course, I knew that everyone in the Universe was bored and would welcome any kind of diversion and that such a time, according to my Tribbon’s Rise and Fall of the American Empire, provided unscrupulous men with a host of willing dupes for religious experimentation. That many of these had been maniacs was a fact which Tribbon, the great unbeliever, italicized. But, so far in history, no one man had managed to swing a nation, much less the Universe, around to his method of thinking. But it had been so long since any man had had to develop an original idea that almost any idea would have been acceptable. I suppose that it was the perfection of communication which made it possible for George Smiley to reach everyone everywhere. And the freedom which the Machine Magistration gave all religious exponents accounted for George Smiley’s not being stopped.
And, worse luck, it seemed that I was the only man left that didn’t want to slip off into the limbo.
It had already been proved that mass concentration could do away with material objects but that fact was so old that, until now, it had lain dormant except in the pranks of schoolboys who, learning about it for the first time, vanished desks out from in front of their professors.
George Smiley, according to these reports, was a virile fellow who had lived alone for years and years as a prospector on Arcton. But the fact that his parents were not known made me believe that perhaps both his father and his mother had finished this life as members of the famous Arcton Prison to which so many universal criminals were shipped. Did this George Smiley have a grudge against the whole Universe?
That sardonic smile of his and those terrifying eyes—
Well! It wasn’t going to do me any good to sit and moon over the papers. Besides I felt I had better put them back before my wife found that I was reading them. Such surrender was unthinkable. Accordingly I walked out into the living room—
And fell!
There must be ground under me!
I lit!
And then I sat there, staring all about me in helpless bewilderment.
There wasn’t any living room anymore. Maybe … maybe my own room—
No, there was no sign of that either.
The papers! The papers I had been holding in my hand—
For a second one sheet rustled and then it, too, faded away.
There was something solid under me but that was all the solidity anywhere.
The city, perhaps the world, perhaps everything, was a flood of gray and curling mist! I felt of myself and was relieved to know that I was still myself anyway. For an instant I had wondered and, wondering, had felt myself thin and pale. But I was again solid and that upon which I was seated was still ground and so I took slight heart.
What, I wondered, had happened to my wife? And what had happened to the house? And the city? Certainly there must be something left of the city. And I began to feel that if I couldn’t find something of it I should certainly go mad.
No more condensochow. No more Old Space Ranger. Oh, my goodness, yes, I had to find the city.
I stood up and groped before me, my hands nearly invisible in the murk. Step by step I found ground and, once, I thought I saw the corner of a building but, when I approached it closely, it, too, was gone.
For what seemed an hour I floundered about without being able to locate a street. I was getting angry, probably because I was getting scared. I consulted my watch and found out that it was half past ten. For what seemed a long while I kept on working along, expecting any moment to find a wall or a conveyer belt or a parked autoairbile but each next moment being disappointed. Finally I again looked at my watch; it was still half past ten. I thought that I must have missed the hands the first time in the absence of light but there was no missing them now, for the dial glowed softly and the mist itself seemed to have some quality of illumination. And then, having groped for what seemed yet a third half-hour, I looked once more at my watch. It was still half past ten!
Had something happened to Time?
Was I adrift in something which wasn’t Space?
There were no quizclickers gaping for their pennies and their questions on each lamppost anymore, and so I had to try and answer it myself.
Yes, there was Space. I could feel myself and I knew I moved and so there must be Space. If it took me time to move— Perhaps, I thought, I had better locate someone else before I went completely mad.
For all this murk was seeping into my heart; like drifting smoke it curled and wound and spired, leaving black alleys stretching endlessly out and then rolling in upon the openings and swallowing them, leaving towers which stretched an infinity up and down and then devouring the towers. The very solidity on which I trod was hidden. There was no direction to anything and I felt that I might well be upside down or horizontal for all I knew. And I might not be walking on anything at all—
And at that thought I began to fall. And falling, I feared earth. And fearing earth, I landed. I was ill. The thought that I must keep earth in mind or fall again was enough to make me do just that. And when again I was upon solidity I understood that I might drop an infinity, step by step, and never arrive at anything.
With great suddenness it came to me that so long as I believed in myself, I was. So long as I believed, there was Space. I was adrift in a murky ocean of mist, drowned in an immensity of nothingness, marooned in nonexistence.
I must find somebody.
I could not tolerate being alone.
And so I stumbled forward, groping hopefully. I was not used to walking any more than anyone else had been used to it. And I began to tire. I had fallen far, I knew and, I supposed, I would have to rise again to the same altitude of the city’s
site before I could discover anything.
But I was wrong. I had begun to wish violently for a bucket to bear me upward and then, banging my shins, I ran into the bucket. I had been wandering so long and so far without any contacts that I gripped that bucket as one grips a lost friend found again. Joyously I put my feet upon it. Gratefully I sank into its fluffoplex arms. And upward I went.
I was almost certain now that I had sunk no lower than the fifth level subsurface, for there the buckets began, and so I waited patiently for the conveyance to gently alight me upon a higher level. But I just kept on going up. Ordinarily it used to take a bucket not more than a minute to lift anyone twenty levels. But I realized that I had been sitting there at least five minutes, ascending swiftly through impenetrable mist.
In sudden panic I wondered where I was going. No bucket I had ever seen could have gone as high as this. Why … why, I must be on a level with the Court Domes. Or—God help me, I must be about to crash through the Weather Roof!
Suddenly I beheld a glass pane above. The bucket hit it squarely and rebounded. Madly I gripped at the chair arms. What if this bucket should vanish? What if the bucket, too, should cease to be? And it did.
I fell through the giddy mists. Only an aircab could have saved me. And then I wasn’t falling. I was sitting in an aircab.
For several seconds I just sat there, clinging thankfully to the seat, not thinking at all about where I might be going. The driver must have seen me falling and zipped under me and was waiting now for me to recover my breath before he asked my destination. I leaned past the meter.
“Thank you,” I said. “If you’ll take me to the Food Central, I’ll be very grateful.”
A face … a face and nothing more glowed briefly above the bar control and a voice snarled, “You can’t do this to me. Who the hell do you think you are?” And the face was gone and the aircab went purring along, utterly driverless.
I was shaken, for it took me some time to understand just what was happening to me. I felt that if I went on like this much longer without the solace of a drink, I should perish. Oh, for a little snort of Old Space Ranger!
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