Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II

by William Tenn

  "I don't like this," the brown-haired woman decided positively. She pulled a small glass vial from a breast pocket. "Whisky, water or whatever it is—I'm going to get a sample and analyze it. You've no idea how many varieties of algae I've seen in the water up here. I think the presence of radioactive ore—Hullo. It doesn't work."

  With thumb and forefinger, she pressed the hot and cold water buttons until the flesh under her fingernails turned white. The faucet remained impassively dry.

  Paul came over and bent his head under the metal arm. He straightened and smiled impishly. "Pour, water!" he commanded. Again water spat from the faucet, this time describing a curve to where Esther Sakarian had moved the vial to permit her companion to examine the plumbing. When the vial was full, the water stopped.

  "Yup!" Paul grinned at the gasping bacteriologist. "Those buttons, the drain—they're only for display. This house does exactly what's required of it—but only when I require it! I have a robot house here, Es, and it's mine, all mine!"

  She closed the vial and replaced it in her pocket. "I think it's a little more than that. Let's get out of here, Paul. Outside of the obvious impossibility of this whole business, there are a couple of things that don't check. I'd like to have Connor Kuntz up here to go over the place. Besides, we'd better get started if we're to make Little Fermi before the sun goes down."

  "You don't tell Kuntz about this," Paul warned her as they moved toward the already opening door. "I don't want him fussing up my robot house."

  Esther shrugged. "I won't, if you insist. But Doc Kuntz might give you a line on exactly what you have here. Hit him with the extraordinary and he'll bring five thousand years of scientific banalities to bear on it. Tell me, do you notice any other change in your land since you were here last?"

  The physicist stood just outside the door and swept his eyes over the tangle of bush that seasoned the glinting patches of swamp and out-cropped rock. Sick orange from the beginning sunset colored the land weirdly, making the desolate subarctic plains look like the backdrop to a dying age. A young, cold wind sprang up and hurried at them, delighting in its own vigor.

  "Well, over there for example. A patch of green grass extending for about a quarter mile. I remember thinking how much like a newly mowed lawn it looked, and how out of place it was in the middle of all this marsh. Over there, where you now see that stretch of absolutely blank brown soil. Of course, it could have withered and died in a week. Winter's coming on."

  "Hm-m-m." She stepped back and looked up at the green roof of the cottage which harmonized so unostentatiously with the green shutters and door and the sturdy white of the walls. "Do you think—"

  Paul leaped away from the door and stood rubbing his shoulder. He giggled awkwardly. "Seemed as if the post reached over and began rubbing against me. Didn't frighten me exactly—just sort of startling."

  He smiled. "I'd say this robot whatever-it-is likes me. Almost a mechanical caress."

  Esther nodded, her lips set, but said nothing until they were in the car again. "You know, Paul," she whispered as they got under way, "I have the intriguing thought that this house of yours isn't a robot at all. I think it's thoroughly alive."

  He widened his eyes at her. Then he pushed his glasses hard against his forehead and chuckled. "Well, that's what they say, Es: It takes a livin' heap to make a house a home!"

  They rode on silently in the seeping darkness, trying to develop reasons and causes, but finding none. It was only when they clattered onto the concrete outskirts of Little Fermi that Paul started abruptly: "I'm going to get some beans and coffee and spend the night in my living house. Breckinbridge won't need me until that shipment of cadmium rods comes in from Edmonton; that means I can spend tonight and all day tomorrow finding out just what I've got."

  His companion started to object, then tossed her head. "I can't stop you. But be careful, or poor Caroline may have to marry a young buck from the Harvard Law School."

  "Don't worry," he boasted. "I'm pretty sure I can make that house jump through hoops if I ask it. And maybe, if I get bored, I'll ask it!"

  He looked up Breckinbridge in the clapboard barracks and got a day's leave of absence from him. Then there was a discussion with the cooks, who were rapidly persuaded to part with miscellaneous packaged foodstuffs. A hurriedly composed telegram to Caroline Hart of Boston, Massachusetts, and he was thumping his way back to the house behind headlights that were willing to split the darkness but were carefully noncommittal about the road.

  It wasn't till Paul saw the house clutching the top of the hill that he realized how easily he would have accepted the fact of its disappearance.

  Parking the runabout on the slope so that its lights illumined the way to the top, he pushed the side back and prepared to get out.

  The door of the house opened. A dark carpet spilled out and humped down the hill to his feet. Regular, sharp protuberances along its length made it a perfect staircase. A definite rosy glow exuded from the protuberances, lighting his way.

  "That's really rolling out the welcome mat," Paul commented as he locked the ignition in the car and started up.

  He couldn't help jumping a bit when, passing through the vestibule, the walls bulged out slightly and touched him gently on either side. But there was such an impression of friendliness in the gesture and they moved back in place so swiftly that there was no logical reason for nervousness.

  The dining-room table seemed to reach up slightly to receive the gear he dropped upon it. He patted it and headed for the kitchen.

  Water still changed into whisky at his unspoken whim; as he desired, it also changed into onion soup, tomato juice and Napoleon brandy. The refrigerator, he found, was full of everything he might want, from five or six raw tenderloins to three bottles of dark beer complete with the brand name he usually asked for when shopping for himself.

  The sight of the food made him hungry; he had missed supper. A steak suffocating under heaps of onions, surrounded by beans and washed down with plenty of hot coffee was an interesting thought. He started for the dining room to collect his gear.

  His haversack still rested on the near side of the table. On the far side... On the far side, there reposed a platter containing a thick steak which supported a huge mound of onions and held an encircling brown mass of beans at one corner. Gleaming silverware lay between the platter and a veritable vase of coffee.

  Paul found himself giggling hysterically and shook fear-wisps out of his head. Everything was obviously channeled for his comfort. Might as well pull up a chair and start eating. He looked around for one, in time to see a chair come gliding across the floor; it poked him delicately behind the knees and he sat down. The chair continued to the appointed position at the table.

  It was while he was spooning away the last of the melon he had imagined into existence for dessert—it had been exuded, complete with dish, from the table top—that he noticed the lighting fixtures were also mere decorative devices. Light came from the walls—or the ceiling—or the floor; it was omnipresent in the house at just the right intensity—and that was all.

  The dirty dishes and used silverware vanished into the table like sugar dissolving into hot solution.

  Before he went up to bed, he decided to look in at the library. Surely, he had originally imagined a library? He decided he couldn't be certain, and thought one up next to the living room.

  All the books he had ever enjoyed were in the warm little space. He spent a contented hour browsing from Aiken to Einstein, until he hit the beautifully bound Britannica. The first volume of the Encyclopedia he opened made him understand the limitations of his establishment.

  The articles he had read completely were complete, those he had read in part showed only the sections he had touched. For the rest, there was a curious blur of not-quite print which puzzled him until he realized that this was just the picture the eyes retained while the pages of a book were flipped before it.

  He climbed the narrow stairs to bed.

&
nbsp; Yawningly tired, he noted vaguely that the bed was just the width he had always wanted. As fast as he dropped his clothes to the bedside chair, they were shaken off and pushed along a writhing strip of floor to the corner closet where he imagined they were hung neatly.

  He lay down finally, repressing a shudder as the sheets curled up and over him of their own accord. Just before he fell asleep, he remembered he'd spent the largest parts of the past three nights playing chess and was likely to oversleep. He'd intended to rise early and examine his delightfully subservient property in detail, but since he hadn't thought to bring an alarm clock—

  Did that matter?

  He raised himself on one elbow, the sheet still hugging his chest. "Listen, you," he told the opposite wall sternly. "Wake me exactly eight hours from now. And do it pleasantly, understand?"

  —|—

  Wakefulness came with a sense of horror that nibbled at his mind. He lay still, wondering what had shocked him so.

  "Paul, darling, please wake up. Paul, darling, please wake up. Paul, darling, please—"

  Caroline's voice! He leaped out of bed and looked around crazily. What was Caroline doing here? The telegram he'd sent asking her to come up and look at their new house had probably not arrived until breakfast. Even a plane—

  Then he remembered. Of course! He patted the bed. "Nice job. Couldn't have done better myself." The headboard curled against his hand and the walls vibrated with a humming noise that was astonishingly like a baritone purr.

  The shower, he decided, must have been one of those brilliant yearning concepts he had once entertained for a second or two and then forgotten. It was merely a matter of stepping into a roomy cubicle dotted with multitudes of tiny holes and being sprayed with warm lather which stopped the moment he was soaped up and was succeeded by plain water at the same temperature. As the lather washed away, needle jets of air dried him completely.

  He stepped out of the shower to find his clothes hung outside, excellently pressed and smelling faintly of laundry. He was surprised at the laundry odor, although he liked it; but then again that's why there was an odor—because he liked it!

  It was going to be an unusually fine day, he noted, after suggesting to the bathroom window that it open—unfortunate that he hadn't brought any light clothes with him. Then, as his eyes glanced regretfully downward, he observed he was now wearing a sports shirt and summer slacks.

  Evidently his own soiled clothes had been absorbed into the economy of the house and duplicates provided which had the pleasantly adaptive facilities of their source.

  The hearts-of-palm breakfast he had worked out while strolling downstairs was ready for him in the dining room. The copy of Jane Austen's Emma he'd been rereading recently at mealtime lay beside it open to the correct place.

  He sighed happily. "All I need now is a little Mozart played softly."

  So, a little Mozart—

  —|—

  Connor Kuntz's helicopter lazed down out of the mild sky at four o'clock that afternoon. Paul thought the house into a Bunk Johnson trumpet solo and sauntered out to greet his guests.

  Esther Sakarian was out of the plane first. She wore a severe black dress that made her look unusually feminine and much less of a laboratory type. "Sorry about bringing Doc Kuntz, Paul. But for all I knew you might need a medic after a night in this place. And I don't have a copter of my own. He offered to give me a lift."

  "Perfectly all right," he told her magnanimously. "I'm ready to discuss the house with Kuntz or any other biologist."

  She held up a yellow sheet. "For you. Just came."

  He read the telegram and winced.

  "Anything important?" Esther inquired, temporarily looking away from a pink cloud which seemed to have been fascinating her.

  "Oh." He crumpled the sheet and bounced it gloomily on his open palm. "Caroline. Says she's surprised to discover I intended to make my permanent home up here. Says if I'm serious about it, I'd better reconsider our engagement."

  Esther pursed her lips. "Well, it is a nice long haul from Boston. And allowing that your house isn't quite a dead issue..."

  Paul laughed and snapped the paper ball into the air. "Not quite. But the way I feel at the moment: love me, love my house. And, speaking of houses—Down, sir! Down, I say!"

  The house had crept down the slope behind him as he spoke, extruded a bay window and nuzzled his back with it. Now, at his sharp reproach, the window was sucked abruptly into the wall. The house sidled backward to its place at the top of the hill and stood quivering slightly. The trumpet solo developed extremely mournful overtones.

  "Does... does it do that often?"

  "Every time I move a little distance away," he assured her. "I could stop it permanently with a direct overall command, but I find it sort of flattering. I also don't want to step on a pretty warm personality. No harm in it. Hey, Connor, what do you think?"

  The doctor perspired his plump body past them and considered the noisy structure warily. "Just now—I confess I don't know."

  "Better give it up, Connor," Esther advised, "or you'll rupture an analysis."

  Paul slapped his back. "Come inside and I'll explain it over a couple of glasses of beer I just got thirsty enough to think about."

  Five beers later, Dr. Connor Kuntz used the black beads he had in place of eyes to watch his host shimmer from the uniform of the Coldstream Guards to a sharply cut tuxedo.

  "Of course I believe it. Since it is so, it is so. You have a living house here. Now we must decide what we are to do with it."

  Paul Marquis looked up, halfway into a white gabardine suit. The lapels, still tuxedo, hesitated; then gathered their energies and blended into a loose summer outfit.

  "What we are to do with it?"

  Kuntz rose and wrapped his hands behind his back, slapping the knuckles of one into the palm of the other. "You're quite right about keeping the information secret from the men in the development; a careless word and you would be undergoing swarms of dangerously inquisitive tourists. I must get in touch with Dr. Dufayel in Quebec; this is very much his province. Although there's a young man at Johns Hopkins—How much have you learned of its basic, let us say its personal composition?"

  The young physicist's face lost its grip on resentment. "Well, the wood feels like wood, the metal like metal, the plastic like plastic. And when the house produces a glass-like object, it's real glass so far as I can determine without a chemical analysis. Es, here, took—"

  "That's one of the reasons I decided to bring Connor along. Biologically and chemically, the water is safe—too safe. It's absolutely pure H2O. What do you think of my chlorophyll roof theory, doctor?"

  He ducked his head at her. "Possibly. Some form of solar energy transformation in any case. But chlorophyll would argue a botanical nature, while it has distinct and varied means of locomotion—internal and external. Furthermore, the manipulation of metals which do not exist in any quantities in this region suggest subatomic reorganization of materials. Esther, we must prepare some slides from this creature. Suppose you run out to the plane like a good girl and get my kit. For that matter, you can prepare slides yourself, can't you? I want to explore a bit."

  "Slides?" Paul Marquis asked uncertainly as the bacteriologist started for the open door. "It's a living thing, you know."

  "Ah, we'll just take a small area from an... a nonvital spot. Much like scraping a bit of skin off the human hand. Tell me," the doctor requested, thumping on the table experimentally, "you no doubt have some vague theories as to origin?"

  Marquis settled himself back in a gleaming chair. "As a matter of fact, they're a little more than that. I remembered the ore in Pit Fourteen gave out suddenly after showing a lot of promise. Pit Fourteen's the closest to here from Little Fermi. Adler, the geologist in charge, commented at the time that it seemed as if Pit Fourteen had been worked before—about six thousand years ago. Either that or glacial scraping. But since there was little evidence of glacial scraping in the neighbor
hood, and no evidence of a previous, prehistoric pitchblende mine, he dropped the matter. I think this house is the rest of the proof of that prehistoric mine. I also think we'll find radioactive ore all the way from this site to the edge of Pit Fourteen."

  "Comfortable situation for you if they do," Kuntz observed, moving into the kitchen. Paul Marquis rose and followed him. "How would this peculiar domicile enter into the situation?"

  "Well, unless our archaeology still has to grow out of its diapers, nobody on Earth was interested in pitchblende six thousand years ago. That would leave the whole wide field of extraterrestrials—from a planet of our sun or one of the other stars. This could have been a fueling station for their ships, a regularly worked mine, or an unforeseen landing to make repairs and take on fuel."

  "And the house?"

  "The house was their dwelling—probably a makeshift, temporary job—while they worked the mine. When they went, they left it here as humans will leave deserted wood and metal shacks when they move out of Little Fermi one day. It lay here waiting for something—say the thought of ownership or the desire for a servitor-dwelling—to release a telepathic trigger that would enable it to assume its function of—"

  A despairing shout from Esther tugged them outside.

  "I've just broken my second scalpel on this chunk of iridium masquerading as fragile flesh. I have a definite suspicion, Paul, that I won't so much as scratch it unless you give me permission. Please tell your house it's all right for me to take a tiny chunk."

  "It's... it's all right," Paul said uncomfortably, then added, "only, try not to hurt it too much."

  Leaving the girl slicing a long, thin strip from the western corner, they walked down the cellar steps into the basement. Connor Kuntz stumbled around peering down at the floor for some example of an obviously biological organ. He found only whitewashed cement.