New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6)

by Clifford D. Simak

  He swept his arm about the room, pointed at the globe of brilliant fire that hung suspended between floor and ceiling.

  “Pure energy,” he said. “In there atoms are being created. Millions of horsepower are being generated. An efficient, a continual source of power. Enclosed in a sphere of force waves, the only thing that would stand the pressure and temperature inside the sphere.”

  He ceased speaking, looking around.

  “That’s only one of the things I’ve learned,” he said. “Only one of the things. The Ghosts are my teachers, but given time I will be their master.”

  There was a wild light of fanaticism in his eyes.

  “Why, man,” said Kent, “you will be hailed as the greatest scientist the world has ever known.”

  The man’s eyes seemed to flame. “No, I won’t,” he said, “because I’m not going to tell the world. Why should I tell the world? What has mankind ever done for me?” His laughter bellowed and reverberated in the domed room. “Find out for yourselves,” he shouted. “Go and find out for yourselves. It will take you a million years.”

  His voice calmed. “The Ghosts are almost immortal,” he said. “Not quite—almost. Before I am through with this, I will be immortal. There is a way. I almost have it now. I will become a Ghost—a super-Ghost—a creature of pure force. And when that happens, the Ghosts and I will forsake this worn-out world. We will go out into the void and build a new world, a perfect world. We will live through all eternity and watch and laugh at the foolish strugglings of little people. Little people like mankind.”

  The four of them stared at him.

  “You don’t mean this, Howard,” protested Smith. “You can’t mean it.”

  The wild light was gone from Carter’s eyes. His voice boomed with mockery. “You don’t think so, John?” he asked.

  He reached into his shirt front, pulled out something that shone in the light of the radium bulbs. It was a key, attached to a string hung around his neck. He pulled the loop over his head, handed the key to Kent.

  “The key to the rocket ship,” he said. “The fuel tanks are nearly full. You fly her at a 30-degree angle out of here to miss the cliffs.”

  Kent took the key, turned it awkwardly in his hands.

  Carter bowed ceremoniously to them, still with that old trace of mockery. “I hope you have a fine trip,” he said.

  Slowly they turned away, heading for the door.

  Carter called after them.

  “And you might tell anyone you see not to try to come into Mad-Man’s. Tell them something unpleasant might happen.”

  Charley turned around. “Mister,” he said, “I think you’re batty as a bed-bug.”

  “Charley,” declared Carter, “you aren’t the first one to say that to me. And maybe … well, sometimes, I think, maybe you are right.”

  The sturdy rocket ship blasted its way across the red deserts. Far below, the criss-crossing of the canals, more deeply red, were etched like fiery lines.

  “Lad,” said Charley to Kent, “there’s another story to tell the boys. Another yarn about Harry, the Hermit.”

  “They won’t believe it,” Kent declared. “They’ll listen and then go out and retell it and make it a little better. And someone else will make it better yet. All we can do, Charley, is to give rise to another, an even greater, Harry, the Hermit.”

  Ann, sitting beside her father, smiled at them. “Just a couple of myth-makers,” she said.

  Charley studied the terrain beneath them, combed his beard. “You know,” he said, “I still think that bird back there was off his nut. He’ll try makin’ himself into a Ghost—and just be an ordinary Earth kind of ghost. The kind that just ain’t.”

  A Ghost suddenly materialized, shimmered faintly in the rocket cabin.

  And for the first time known to man, perhaps for the first time in all history, the Ghost spoke, spoke with a voice they all recognized, the voice of the man back in Mad-Man’s, that voice with its old mockery.

  “So you think so, do you?” said the Ghost.

  Then he faded from their view.

  Worlds Without End

  “Worlds Without End” was originally published in the winter 1956–1957 issue of Future Science Fiction. At that time, the magazine was edited by Robert W. Lowndes, who had been purchasing stories from Clifford D. Simak since World War II. However, Lowndes, was not Cliff’s preferred editor; John W. Campbell Jr., who ran Astounding Science Fiction, had that distinction before the war and then Horace Gold, who created Galaxy Magazine. But Lowndes was the one who got this story about the corruption of a long-established organization.

  —dww

  I

  She did not look like the kind of person who would want to take the Dream. Although, Norman Blaine reflected, one could never tell.

  He wrote the name she had given him down on the scratch pad, instead of putting it on the application blank, he wrote it slowly, deliberately, to give himself time to think, for there was something here that was puzzling.

  Lucinda Silone.

  Peculiar name, he thought. Not like a real name. More like a stage name taken to cover up plain Susan Brown, or ordinary Betty Smith, or some other common run of name.

  He wrote it slowly so that he could think, but he couldn’t think too well. There were too many other things cluttering up his brain: The shakeup rumor that had whispered its way for days back and forth within the Center, his own connection with that rumor, and the advice that had been given him—there was something funny about the job. The advice was: don’t trust Farris (as if he needed that advice!)—look it over well if it is offered you. It was all kindly-meant advice, but not very helpful.

  And there was the lapel-clinging Buttonholer who had caught him in the parking lot that morning and had clung onto him when he tried to push him off; there was Harriet Marsh, with whom he had a date this very night.

  Now, finally, this woman across the desk from him.

  Although it was foolish, Blaine told himself—to think a thing like that, to tie her up with all the other thoughts that were bumping together like driftwood in his brain. For there could be no connection—there simply couldn’t be.

  She was Lucinda Silone, she’d said. Something about the name and something, as well, about the way she said it—the little lilting tones meant consciously to give it grace and make it sparkle—set tiny alarm bells ringing in his brain.

  “You’re with Entertainment.” He said it casually, very much off-hand; this was a trick question and one that must be rightly put.

  “Why, no,” she replied, “I’m not.”

  Listening to the way she said it, Blaine could find nothing wrong. Her voice held a touch of fluttery happiness that betrayed pleasure at his thinking she must be Entertainment. And that was just as it should be. It was exactly the way that most of the others answered—flattered at the implication that they belonged to the fabulous Entertainment guild.

  He gave her her money’s worth. “I would have guessed you were.”

  He looked directly at Lucinda Silone, watching the expression on her face, but seeing all the other good points, too. “We get good at judging people here,” he said. “We aren’t often wrong.”

  She didn’t wince. There was no reaction—no start of guilt, no flutter of confusion.

  Her hair was honey color, her eyes were china blue, and her skin so milky white that one looked a second time to make sure that it was real.

  We don’t get many like this one, thought Blaine. The old and sick and the disappointed. The desperate ones and those who know frustration.

  “You’re mistaken, Mr. Blaine,” she said. “I am Education.”

  He wrote Education on the scratch pad, and said, “It may have been the name. It’s a very good name. Easy to say. Musical. It would go well on the stage.”

  He looked up from th
e pad and said, smiling—making himself smile against the inexplicable tension that was rising in him: “Although it was not the name alone; I am sure of that.”

  She didn’t smile and he wondered swiftly if he had been awkward. He snapped the words he’d said in quick review across his mind and decided that he’d not been awkward. When you were director of Fabrication, you were not an awkward man. You knew how to handle people; you had to know how to handle them. And you knew, as well, how to handle yourself—how to make your face say one thing while your mind might be thinking something else.

  No, his words had been a compliment, and not too badly put. She should have smiled. That she had failed to smile might mean something—or it mightn’t mean a thing, except that she was clever. Norman Blaine had no doubt that Lucinda Silone was clever, and as cool a customer as he had ever seen.

  Although coolness in itself was not too unusual. You got the cool ones, too—the cool and calculating—the ones who had figured it all out well ahead of time and knew what they were doing. And there were others, too, who had cut off all retreat behind them.

  “You wish a Sleep,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “And a Dream?”

  “And a Dream,” she said.

  “You’ve thought it out quite thoroughly, I suppose. You wouldn’t come, of course, if you had any doubts.”

  “I’ve thought it through,” she told him, “and I have no doubts.”

  “You still have time. You’ll have time to change your mind up to the final moment. We’re most anxious that you get that fact fixed firmly in your mind.”

  “I’ll not change my mind,” she said.

  “We still prefer to assume you may. We do not try to change your mind, but we insist upon complete understanding upon your part that a change is possible. You are under no obligation to us. No matter how far we’ve gone, there still is no obligation. The Dream may have been fabricated and processed; you may have paid your fee; you may already have entered the receptacle—there’s still time to change your mind. The Dream will then be destroyed, your fee will be returned, and the record will be expunged. So far as we are then concerned, we will have never seen you.”

  “I quite understand,” she said.

  He nodded quietly. “We’ll proceed on that understanding.”

  He picked up his pencil and wrote her name and classification on the application blank. “Age?”

  “Twenty nine.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “Children?”

  “None.”

  “Nearest of kin?”

  “An aunt.”

  “Name?”

  She gave him the name and he wrote it down, with address, age and classification of the aunt.

  “Any others?”

  “None at all.”

  “Your parents?”

  Her parents had been dead for years, she said; she was an only child. She gave her parents’ names, their classifications, their ages at the time of death, their last place of residence, their place of burial.

  “You’ll check on all of this?” she asked.

  “We check on everything.”

  Here was the place where most of the applicants—even those who had nothing in their life to hide—would show some nervousness, would frantically start checking back along their memories to unearth some possible, long-forgotten incident which might turn up in the course of investigation to embarrass or impede them.

  Lucinda Silone was not nervous; she sat there, waiting for the other questions.

  Norman Blaine asked them: The number of her guild, her card number, her immediate superior, last medical exam, physical or psychic defects or ailments—all the other trivia which went into the details of daily life.

  Finally he was finished and laid the pencil down. “Still no doubts?”

  She shook her head.

  “I keep harking back to that,” said Blaine, “to make absolutely certain we have a willing client; otherwise we have no legal status. But aside from that, there is the matter of ethics …”

  “I understand,” she said, “that you are very ethical.”

  It might have been mockery; if so, it was very clever mockery. He tried to decide if it were or not, but he wasn’t sure.

  He let it drop. “We have to be,” he told her. “Here is a setup which, to survive, must be based on the highest code of ethics. You give your body into our hands for our safekeeping over a number of years. What is more, you give your mind over to us, to a lesser extent. We gain much intimate knowledge of your life in the course of our work with you. To continue in the job we’re doing, we must enjoy the complete confidence not only of our clients, but of the general public. The slightest breath of scandal …”

  “There has never been a scandal?”

  “In the early days, there were a few. They’ve been forgotten now, or we hope they have. It was those early scandals which made our guild realize how important it was that we keep ourselves free of any professional taint. A scandal in any of the other guilds is no more than a legal matter which can be adjudicated in the courts and then forgiven and forgotten. But with us there’d be no forgiving or forgetting; we’d never live it down.”

  Sitting there, Norman Blaine thought of his pride in the work he did—a bright and shining pride, a comfortable and contented pride in a job well done. And this feeling was not confined to he himself alone, but was held by everyone at Center. They might be flippant when they talked among themselves, but the pride was there, hidden deep beneath the flippancy and the workaday approach.

  “You almost sound,” she said, “like a dedicated people.”

  Mockery again, he wondered. Or was it flattery to match his own. He smiled a little at it. “Not dedicated,” he said. “At least, we never think of ourselves as dedicated.”

  And that was not quite right, he knew, for there were times when every one of them must have thought of themselves as dedicated. It was not a thing, of course, that one could say aloud—but the thought was there.

  It was a strange situation, he thought—the pride of work, the fierce loyalty to the guild itself, and, then, the cutthroat competition, and the vicious Center politics which existed in the midst of that pride and loyalty.

  Take Roemer for example. John Roemer, after years of work, was on his way out. That had been the talk for days—the open secret which had been whispered through the Center. Farris had something to do with it, Lew Giesey was involved in some way, and there were others who were mentioned. Blaine himself, for example, had been mentioned as one of the men who might be chosen to step up into Roemer’s position. Thank goodness, he had steered clear of Center politics all these years. There was too much headache in Center politics. Norman Blaine’s work had been enough for him.

  Although it would be fine, he thought, if he were picked to take over Roemer’s job. It was higher up the ladder; the pay was better; and maybe if he got more money he could talk Harriet into giving up her newspaper job and …

  He pulled himself back to the job at hand.

  “There are certain considerations which you should take into account,” he told the woman across the desk. “You should realize all the implications of what your decision means before you go ahead. You must realize that once you go to sleep, you will awaken in a culture different than your own. The planets will not stand still while you sleep; they will advance—or at least we hope they will. Much will be different. Styles will change, in clothing and in manners. Thought and speech and perspective—all will change. You will awaken an alien in a world that has left you far behind; you will be old fashioned.

  “There will be public issues of which there now is not the faintest inkling. Governments may have evolved, and customs will be different. What is illegal today may have become quite acceptable; what is acceptable and legal today may have be
come outrageous or illegal then. Your friends will all be dead …”

  “I have no friends,” Lucinda Silone said.

  He disregarded her and went on: “What I am trying to impress upon you is that once you wake you cannot step from here straight back into the world, for it will be your world no longer. Your world will have died many years before; you will have to be readjusted, will have to take a course in reorientation. In certain instances, depending upon the awakened person to some extent, to the cultural changes to an even greater extent, this matter of reorientation may take quite some time. For we must give you not only the facts of the changes which have occurred while you were asleep—we must gain your acceptance of those changes. Until you have readjusted not only your data, but your culture as well, we cannot let you go. To live a normal life in that world in which you wake you must accept it as if you had been born into it—you must become, in fact, part of it. And that must often be a long and painful process.”

  “I realize all that,” she said; “I’m ready to abide by all the conditions you lay down.”

  She had not hesitated once. Lucinda Silone had shown no regret or nervousness. She was as cool and calm as when she’d walked into the office.

  “Now,” Blaine said, “the reason.”

  “The reason?”

  “The reason why you wish to take the Sleep; we must know.”

  “You’ll investigate that, too?”

  “We shall; we must be sure, you see. There are many reasons—many more than you’d think there’d be.”

  He kept on talking, to give her a chance to steel herself and tell him the reason. More often than not this was the hardest thing of all that a client faced. “There are those,” he said, “who take the Sleep because they have a disease which at the moment is incurable. They do not contract for a Sleep of any specified length, but only till the day when a cure has been discovered.

  “Then there are those who wish to wait out the time against the return of a loved one who is traveling to the stars—waiting out on Earth the subjective time of the faster-than-light flights. And there are those who wish to sleep out an investment which they are sure, given time, will make them a fortune. Usually we try to talk them out of it; we call in our economists, who try to show them …”