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

by Clifford D. Simak

  But the job was his—he’d stuck out his neck to get it and it was his. It was not something he had sought, but now that he had it, he’d keep it. It was a step up the ladder; it was advancement. It paid better, had more prestige, and put him closer to the top—third from the top, in fact, for the chain of command ran: business agent, Protection, and then Records.

  He’d tell Harriet tonight—but, no, he kept forgetting; he’d not see Harriet tonight.

  He put the keys in his pocket and picked up the note again. If you should want to see me later, I am at your service.

  Protocol? he wondered. Or was there something that he might need to know? Something that needed telling?

  Could it be that Roemer had come to tell him something and then had lost his nerve?

  Blaine crumpled the note and hurled it to the floor. He wanted to get out, get away from Center, get out where he could try to think it out, plan what he was to do. He should clean out his desk, he knew, but it was late—far past quitting tune. And there was his date with Harriet—no, damn it, he kept forgetting. Harriet had called and said she couldn’t make it.

  There’d be time tomorrow to clean out his desk. He took his hat and coat and went out to the parking lot.

  An armed guard had replaced the regular attendant at the entrance to the lot. Blaine showed his identification.

  “All right, sir,” said the guard. “Keep an eye peeled, though. A suspendee got away.”

  “Got away?”

  “Sure; just woke a week or two ago.”

  “He can’t get far,” said Elaine. “Things change; he’ll give himself away. How long was he in Sleep?”

  “Five hundred years, I think.”

  “Things change a lot in five hundred years. He hasn’t got a chance.”

  The guard shook his head. “I feel sorry for him. Must be tough, waking up like that.”

  “It’s tough, all right. We try to tell them, but they never listen.”

  “Say,” said the guard, “you’re the one who found Giesey.”

  Blaine nodded.

  “Was it the way they tell it? Was he dead when you got there?”

  “He was dead.”

  “Murdered?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It does beat hell. You get up to the top, then pouf …”

  “It does beat hell,” agreed Blaine.

  “You never know.”

  “No, you never do.” Blaine hurried off.

  He drove out of the lot and swung onto the highway. Dusk was just beginning and the road was almost deserted.

  Norman Blaine drove slowly, watching the autumn countryside slide past. The first lamps glimmered from the windows of the villas set upon the hills; there was the smell of burning leaves and of the slow, sad dying of the year.

  Thoughts flitted at him, like the skimming birds hurrying to a night-time tree, but he batted them away—the Buttonholer who had grabbed him—what Farris might suspect or know and what he might intend to do—why John Roemer had called personally to deliver the keys, and then had decided not to wait—why a suspendee should escape.

  And that last one was a funny deal; it was downright crazy, when you thought about it. What could possibly be gained by such an escape, such a fleeing out into an alien world for which one was not prepared? It would be like going to an alien planet all alone without adequate briefing. It would be like walking onto a job with which one had no acquaintance and trying to bluff one’s way.

  I wonder why, he thought. I wonder why he did it.

  He brushed the thought away; there was too much to think of. He’d have to get it straightened out before he could think it through. He could not allow himself to get the thoughts all cluttered up.

  He reached out to the dash and turned on the radio.

  A commentator was saying: “ … who know their political history can recognize the crisis points that now are becoming more clearly defined. For more than five hundred years, the government, in actuality, has been in the hands of the Central Labor Union. Which is to say that the government is rule by committee, with each of the guilds and unions represented on the central group. That such a group should be able to continue in control for five full centuries—for the last 60 years in openly admitted control—is not so much to be attributed to wisdom, forebearance, or patience, as to a fine balance of power which has obtained within the body at all times. Mutual distrust and fear have at no time allowed any one union or guild or any combination to become dominant. As soon as one group threatened to become so, the personal ambitions of other groups operated to undermine the ascendant group.

  “But this, as everyone must recognize, is a situation which has lasted longer than could normally have been expected. For years the stronger unions have been building up their strength—and not trying to use it. You may be sure that none of them will attempt to use their strength until they’re absolutely sure of themselves. Just where any of them stand, strength-wise, is impossible to say, for it is not good strategy that any union should let its strength be known. The day cannot be too far distant when there must be a matching of this strength. The situation, as it stands, must seem intolerable to some of the stronger unions with ambitious leaders …”

  Blaine turned off the radio and was astonished at the solemn peace of the autumn evening. It was all old stuff, anyway. So long as he could remember, there had been commentators talking thus. There were eternal rumors which at one time would name Transportation as the union that would take over, and at another time would hint at Communications, and at still another time would insist—just as authoritatively—that Food was the one to watch.

  Dreams, he told himself smugly, were beyond that kind of politics. The guild—his guild—stood for public service. It was represented on Central, as was its right and duty, but it had never played at politics.

  It was Communications that was always stirring up a fuss with articles in the papers and blatting commentators. If he didn’t miss his guess, Blaine told himself, Communications was the worst of all—in there every minute waiting for its chance. Education, too; Education was always fouling up the detail, and what a bunch of creeps!

  He shook his head, thinking of how lucky he was to be with Dreams—not to have to feel a sense of guilt when the rumors came around. You could be sure that Dreams never would be mentioned; of all the unions, Dreams was the only one that could stand up straight and tall.

  He’d argued with Harriet about Communications, and at times she had gotten angry with him; she seemed to have the stubborn notion that Communications was the union which had the best public service record and the cleanest slate.

  It was natural, of course, Blaine admitted, that one should think his own particular union was all right. Unions were the only loyalty to which a man could cling. Once, long ago, there had been nations and the love of one’s own nation was known as patriotism. But now the unions had taken their place.

  He drove into the valley that wound among the hills, and finally turned off the highway and followed the winding road that climbed into the hills.

  Dinner would be waiting and Ansel would be cross (he was a cranky robot at the best). Philo would be waiting for him at the gate and they’d ride in together.

  He passed Harriet’s house and stared briefly at it, set well back among the trees, but there were no lights. Harriet wasn’t home. An assignment, she had said; an interview with someone.

  He turned in at his own gate and Philo was there, barking out his heart. Norman Blaine slowed the car and the dog jumped in, reached up to nuzzle his master’s cheek just once, then settled sedately in the seat while they wheeled around the drive to stop before the house.

  Philo leaped out quickly and Blaine got out more slowly. It had been a tiring day, he told himself. Now that he was home, he suddenly was tired.

  He stood for a moment, looking at the
house. It was a good house, he thought; a good place for a family—if he ever could persuade Harriet to give up her news career.

  A voice said: “All right. You can turn around now. And take it easy; don’t try any funny stuff.”

  Slowly Blaine turned. A man stood beside the car in the gathering dusk. He held a glinting object in his hand and he said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of; I don’t intend you any harm. Just don’t get gay about it.”

  The man’s clothes were wrong; they seemed to be some sort of uniform. And his words were wrong. The inflection was a bit off color, concise and crisp, lacking the slurring of one word into another which marked the language. And the phrases—funny stuff; don’t get gay.

  “This is a gun I have. No monkey business, please.”

  Monkey business.

  “You are the man who escaped,” said Blaine.

  “That I am.”

  “But how …”

  “I rode all the way with you. Hung underneath the car; those dumb cops didn’t think to look.”

  The man shrugged. “I regretted it once or twice. You drove further than I hoped. I almost let go a time or two. “

  “But me? Why did you …”

  “Not you, mister; anyone at all. It was a way to hide—a means to get away.”

  “I don’t read you,” Blaine told him. “You could have made a clean break; you could have let go at the gate. The car was going slow then. You could have sneaked away right now. I’d never noticed you.”

  “And been picked up as soon as I showed myself. The clothes are a giveaway. So is my speech. Then there’s my eating habits, and maybe even the way I walk. I would stick out like a bandaged thumb.”

  “I see,” said Blaine. “All right, then; put up the gun. You must be hungry. We’ll go in and eat.”

  The man put away the gun. He patted his pocket. “I still have it, and I can get it fast. Don’t try any swifties.”

  “O.K.,” said Blaine. “No swifties.” Thinking: Picturesque. Swifties. Never heard the word. But it had a meaning; there could be no doubt of that.

  “By the way, how did you get that gun?”

  “That’s something,” said the man, “I’m not telling you.”

  VI

  His name, the fugitive said, was Spencer Collins. He’d been in suspension for five hundred years; he’d come out of it just a month before. Physically, he said, he was as good a man as ever—fifty-five, and well preserved. He’d paid attention to himself all his life—had eaten right, hadn’t gone without sleep, had exercised both mind and body, knew something about psychosomatics.

  “I’ll say this for your outfit,” he told Blaine, “you know how to take care of a sleeper’s body. I was a little gaunt when I came out; a little weak; but there’d been no deterioration.”

  Norman Blaine chuckled. “We’re at work at it constantly. I don’t know anything about it, of course, but the biology boys are at it all the time—it’s a continuing problem with them. A practical problem. During your five hundred years you probably were shifted a dozen times or more—to a better receptacle each time, with improvements in the operation. You got the benefit of the new improvements as soon as we worked them out.”

  Collins had been a professor of sociology, he said, and he’d evolved a theory. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t go into what it was.”

  “Why certainly,” said Blaine.

  “It’s not of too much interest except to the academic mind. I presume you’re not an academic mind.”

  “I suppose I’m not.”

  “It involved long-term social development,” Collins told him. “I figured that five hundred years should show some indication of whether I had been right or wrong. I was curious. It’s rough to figure out a thing, then up and die without ever knowing if it comes true or not.”

  “I can understand.”

  “If you doubt me in any detail you can check the record.”

  “I don’t doubt a word of it,” said Blaine.

  “You are used to screwball cases.”

  “Screwball?”

  “Loopy. Crazy.”

  “I see many screwball cases,” Blaine assured him.

  But nothing quite so screwball as this, he thought. Nothing quite so crazy as sitting on the patio beneath the autumn stars, on his own home acres, talking to a man five centuries out of time. If he were in Readjustment, of course, he’d be accustomed to it, would not think it strange at all; Readjustment worked continually with cases just like this.

  Collins was fascinating. His inflection betrayed the change in the spoken language, and there were those slang words always cropping up—idioms of the past that had somehow missed fire and found no place within the living language, although many others had survived.

  At dinner there had been dishes the man had tackled with distrust, others that he’d eaten with disgust showing on his face, yet too polite to refuse them outright—determined, perhaps, to do his best to fit into the culture in which he found himself.

  There were certain little mannerisms and affectations that seemed pointless now; performed too often, they could become distinctly irritating. These were actions like stroking his chin when he was thinking, or popping joints by pulling at his fingers. That last one, Blaine told himself, was unnerving and indecent. Perhaps in the past it had not been ill-bred to fiddle with one’s body. He’d have to look that one up, he told himself, or maybe ask someone. The boys in Readjustment would know—they’d know a lot of things.

  “I wonder if you’d tell me,” Blaine asked,—”this theory of yours. Did it work out the way you thought it would?”

  “I don’t know. You’ll agree, perhaps, that I’ve scarcely been in a position to find out.”

  “I suppose that’s true. But I thought you might have asked.”

  “I didn’t ask,” said Collins.

  They sat in the evening silence, looking out across the valley.

  “You’ve come a long way in the last five hundred years,” Collins finally said. “When I went to sleep, we were speculating on the stars and everyone was saying that the light speed limit had us licked on that. But today …”

  “I know,” said Blaine. “Another five hundred years …”

  “You could go on forever and forever—sleep a thousand years and see what had happened. Then another …”

  “It wouldn’t be worth it.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Collins.

  A nighthawk skimmed above the trees and planed into the sky in jerky, fluttering motions, busy catching insects. “That doesn’t change,” said Collins. “I can remember nighthawks …”

  He paused, then asked, “What are you going to do with me?”

  “You’re my guest.”

  “Until the keepers come.”

  “We’ll talk about it later; you are safe tonight.”

  “There is one thing you’ve been wondering about; I’ve watched it gnawing at you.”

  “Why you ran away.”

  “That is it,” said Collins.

  “Well?”

  “I chose a dream,” said Collins, “such as you might expect. I asked a professorial retreat—a sort of idealized monastery where I could spend my time in study, where I could live with other men who could talk my language. I wanted peace—a walk along a quiet river, a good sunset, simple food, time for reading and for thinking …”

  Blaine nodded appreciatively. “A good choice, Collins; there should be more like it.”

  “I thought so, too,” said Collins. “It was what I wanted.”

  “It proved enjoyable?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t know?”

  “I never got it.”

  “But the Dream was fabricated …”

  “I got a different dream.”

  “The
re was some mistake.”

  “No mistake,” said Collins; “I am sure there wasn’t.”

  “When you ask a certain dream,” Blaine began, speaking stiffly, but Collins cut him short. “There was no mistake, I tell you. The dream was substituted.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “Because the dream they gave me wasn’t one that anyone would ask for. Not even one that ever would be thought of. It was one that was deliberately tailored for some reason I can’t figure out. It was a different world.”

  “An alien world!”

  “Not alien; it was Earth, all right—but a different culture. I lived five hundred years in that world, every minute of five hundred years. The dream pattern was not shortened as I understand they often are, telescoping a thousand years of Sleep into a normal lifetime. I got the works, the full five hundred years. I know what the score is when I tell you that it was a deliberately fashioned dream—no mistake at all—but fashioned for a purpose.”

  “Now let’s not rush ahead so fast,” protested Blaine. “Let us take it easy. The world had a different culture?”

  “It was a world,” said Collins, “in which the profit motive had been eliminated, in which the concept of profit never had been thought of. It was the same world that we have, but lacking in all the factors and forces which in our world stem from the profit motive. To me, of course, it was utterly fantastic, but to the natives of the place—if you can call them that—it seemed the normal thing.”

  He watched Blaine closely. “I think you’ll agree,” he said, “that no one would want to live in a world like that. No one would ask a Dream like that.”

  “Some economist, perhaps …”

  “An economist would know better. And, aside from that, there was a terribly consistent pattern to the dream that no one without prior knowledge could ever figure out to put into a dream.”

  “Our machine …”

  “Your machine would have no more prior knowledge than you yourself. No more, at least, than your best economist. And another thing—that machine is illogical; that’s the beauty of it. It needn’t think in logic. It shouldn’t, because that would spoil the Dream. A Dream should not be logical.”