“Yes, I guess I do,” said Lambert. “Reading is a comfort.”
And that was true, he thought. Books lined up on a shelf were a group of friends—not books, but men and women who talked with him across the span of continents and centuries of time. His books, he knew, would not live as some of the others had. They would not long outlast him, but at times he liked to think of the possibility that a hundred years from now someone might find one of his books, in a used bookstore, perhaps, and, picking it up, read a few paragraphs of his, maybe liking it well enough to buy it and take it home, where it would rest on the shelves a while, and might, in time, find itself back in a used bookstore again, waiting for someone else to pick it up and read.
It was strange, he thought, that he had written of things close to home, of those things that most passed by without even seeing, when he could have written of the wonders to be found light-years from earth—the strangenesses that could be found on other planets circling other suns. But of these he had not even thought to write, for they were secret, an inner part of him that was of himself alone, a confidence between himself and Phil that he could not have brought himself to violate.
“We need some rain,” said Hopkins. “The pastures are going. The pastures on the Jones place are almost bare. You don’t see the grass; you see the ground. Caleb has been feeding his cattle hay for the last two weeks, and if we don’t get some rain, I’ll be doing the same in another week or two. I’ve got one patch of corn I’ll get some nubbins worth the picking, but the rest of it is only good for fodder. It does beat hell. A man can work his tail off some years and come to nothing in the end.”
They talked for another hour or so—the comfortable, easy talk of countrymen who were deeply concerned with the little things that loomed so large for them. Then Hopkins said good-by and, kicking his ramshackle car into reluctant life, drove off down the road.
When the sun was just above the western hills, Lambert went inside and put on a pot of coffee to go with a couple of slices of Katie’s bread and a big slice of Katie’s pie. Sitting at the table in the kitchen—a table on which he’d eaten so long as memory served—he listened to the ticking of the ancient family clock. The clock, he realized as he listened to it, was symbolic of the house. When the clock talked to him, the house talked to him as well—the house using the clock as a means of communicating with him. Perhaps not talking to him, really, but keeping close in touch, reminding him that it still was there, that they were together, that they did not stand alone. It had been so through the years; it was more so than ever now, a closer relationship, perhaps arising from the greater need on both their parts.
Although stoutly built by his maternal great-grandfather the house stood in a state of disrepair. There were boards that creaked and buckled when he stepped on them, shingles that leaked in the rainy season. Water streaks ran along the walls, and in the back part of the house, protected by the hill that rose abruptly behind it, where the sun’s rays seldom reached, there was the smell of damp and mold.
But the house would last him out, he thought, and that was all that mattered. Once he was no longer here, there’d be no one for it to shelter. It would outlast both him and Phil, but perhaps there would be no need for it to outlast Phil. Out among the stars, Phil had no need of the house. Although, he told himself, Phil would be coming home soon. For he was old and so, he supposed, was Phil. They had, between the two of them, not too many years to wait.
Strange, he thought, that they, who were so much alike, should have lived such different lives—Phil, the wanderer, and he, the stay-at-home, and each of them, despite the differences in their lives, finding so much satisfaction in them.
His meal finished, he went out on the patio again. Behind him, back of the house, the wind soughed through the row of mighty evergreens, those alien trees planted so many years ago by that old great-grandfather. What a cross-grained conceit, he thought—to plant pines at the base of a hill that was heavy with an ancient growth of oaks and maples, as if to set off the house from the land on which it was erected.
The last of the fireflies were glimmering in the lilac bushes that flanked the gate, and the first of the whippoorwills were crying mournfully up the hollows. Small, wispy clouds partially obscured the skies, but a few stars could be seen. The moon would not rise for another hour or two.
To the north a brilliant star flared out, but watching it, he knew it was not a star. It was a spaceship coming in to land at the port across the river. The flare died out, then flickered on again, and this time did not die out but kept on flaring until the dark line of the horizon cut it off. A moment later, the muted rumble of the landing came to him, and in time it too died out, and he was left alone with the whippoorwills and fireflies.
Someday, on one of those ships, he told himself, Phil would be coming home. He would come striding down the road as he always had before, unannounced but certain of the welcome that would be waiting for him. Coming with the fresh scent of space upon him, crammed with wondrous tales, carrying in his pocket some alien trinket as a gift that, when he was gone, would be placed on the shelf of the old breakfront in the living room, to stand there with the other gifts he had brought on other visits.
There had been a time when he had wished it had been he rather than Phil who had left. God knows, he had ached to go. But once one had gone, there had been no question that the other must stay on. One thing he was proud of—he had never hated Phil for going. They had been too close for hate. There could never be hate between them.
There was something messing around behind him in the pines. For some time now, he had been hearing the rustling but paying no attention to it. It was a coon, most likely, on its way to raid the cornfield that ran along the creek just east of his land. The little animal would find poor pickings there, although there should be enough to satisfy a coon. There seemed to be more rustling than a coon would make. Perhaps it was a family of coons, a mother and her cubs.
Finally, the moon came up, a splendor swimming over the great dark hill behind the house. It was a waning moon that, nevertheless, lightened up the dark. He sat for a while longer and began to feel the chill that every night, even in the summer, came creeping from the creek and flowing up the hollows.
He rubbed an aching knee, then got up slowly and went into the house. He had left a lamp burning on the kitchen table, and now he picked it up, carrying it into the living room and placing it on the table beside an easy chair. He’d read for an hour or so, he told himself, then be off to bed.
As he picked a book off the shelf behind the chair, a knock came at the kitchen door. He hesitated for a moment and the knock came again. Laying down the book, he started for the kitchen, but before he got there, the door opened, and a man came into the kitchen. Lambert stopped and stared at the indistinct blur of the man who’d come into the house. Only a little light came from the lamp in the living room, and he could not be sure.
“Phil?” he asked, uncertain, afraid that he was wrong.
The man stepped forward a pace or two. “Yes, Ed,” he said. “You did not recognize me. After all the years, you don’t recognize me.”
“It was so dark,” said Lambert, “that I could not be sure.”
He strode forward with his hand held out, and Phil’s hand was there to grasp it. But when their hands met in the handshake, there was nothing there. Lambert’s hand closed upon itself.
He stood stricken, unable to move, tried to speak and couldn’t, the words bubbling and dying and refusing to come out.
“Easy, Ed,” said Phil. “Take it easy now. That’s the way it’s always been. Think back. That has to be the way it’s always been. I am a shadow only. A shadow of yourself.”
But that could not be right, Lambert told himself. The man who stood there in the kitchen was a solid man, a man of flesh and bone, not a thing of shadow.
“A ghost,” he managed to say. “You can’t be a ghost.”
&nb
sp; “Not a ghost,” said Phil. “An extension of yourself. Surely you had known.”
“No,” said Lambert. “I did not know. You are my brother, Phil.”
“Let’s go into the living room,” said Phil. “Let’s sit down and talk. Let’s be reasonable about this. I rather dreaded coming, for I knew you had this thing about a brother. You know as well as I do you never had a brother. You are an only child.”
“But when you were here before …”
“Ed, I’ve not been here before. If you are only honest with yourself, you’ll know I’ve never been. I couldn’t come back, you see, for then you would have known. And up until now, maybe not even now, there was no need for you to know. Maybe I made a mistake in coming back at all.”
“But you talk,” protested Lambert, “in such a manner as to refute what you are telling me. You speak of yourself as an actual person.”
“And I am, of course,” said Phil. “You made me such a person. You had to make me a separate person or you couldn’t have believed in me. I’ve been to all the places you have known I’ve been, done all the things that you know I’ve done. Not in detail, maybe, but you know the broad outlines of it. Not at first, but later on, within a short space of time, I became a separate person. I was, in many ways, quite independent of you. Now let’s go in and sit down and be comfortable. Let us have this out. Let me make you understand, although in all honesty, you should understand, yourself.”
Lambert turned and stumbled back into the living room and let himself down, fumblingly, into the chair beside the lamp. Phil remained standing, and Lambert, staring at him, saw that Phil was his second self, a man similar to himself, almost identical to himself—the same white hair, the same bushy eyebrows, the same crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the same planes to his face.
He fought for calmness and objectivity. “A cup of coffee, Phil?” he asked. “The pot’s still on the stove, still warm.”
Phil laughed. “I cannot drink,” he said, “or eat. Or a lot of other things. I don’t even need to breathe. It’s been a trial sometimes, although there have been advantages. They have a name out in the stars for me. A legend. Most people don’t believe in me. There are too many legends out there. Some people do believe in me. There are people who’ll believe in anything at all.”
“Phil,” said Lambert, “that day in the barn. When you told me you were leaving, I did stand in the door and watch you walk away.”
“Of course you did,” said Phil. “You watched me walk away, but you knew then what it was you watched. It was only later that you made me into a brother—a twin brother, was it not?”
“There was a man here from the university,” said Lambert. “A professor of psychology. He was curious. He had some sort of study going. He’d hunted up the records. He said I never had a brother. I told him he was wrong.”
“You believed what you said,” Phil told him. “You knew you had a brother. It was a defensive mechanism. You couldn’t live with yourself if you had thought otherwise. You couldn’t admit the kind of thing you are.”
“Phil, tell me. What kind of thing am I?”
“A breakthrough,” said Phil. “An evolutionary breakthrough. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I am sure I’m right. There was no compulsion on my part to hide and obscure the facts, for I was the end result. I hadn’t done a thing; you were the one who did it. I had no guilt about it. And I suppose you must have. Otherwise, why all this smokescreen about dear brother Phil?”
“An evolutionary breakthrough, you say. Something like an amphibian becoming a dinosaur?”
“Not that drastic,” said Phil. “Surely you have heard of people who had several personalities, changing back and forth without warning from one personality to another. But always in the same body. You read the literature on identical twins—one personality in two different bodies. There are stories about people who could mentally travel to distant places, able to report, quite accurately, what they had seen.”
“But this is different, Phil.”
“You still call me Phil.”
“Dammit, you are Phil.”
“Well, then, if you insist. And I am glad you do insist. I’d like to go on being Phil. Different, you say. Of course, it’s different. A natural evolutionary progression beyond the other abilities I mentioned. The ability to split your personality and send it out on its own, to make another person that is a shadow of yourself. Not mind alone, something more than mind. Not quite another person, but almost another person. It is an ability that made you different, that set you off from the rest of the human race. You couldn’t face that. No one could. You couldn’t admit, not even to yourself, that you were a freak.”
“You’ve thought a lot about this.”
“Certainly I have. Someone had to. You couldn’t, so it was up to me.”
“But I don’t remember any of this ability. I still can see you walking off. I have never felt a freak.”
“Certainly not. You built yourself a cover so fast and so secure you even fooled yourself. A man’s ability for self-deception is beyond belief.”
Something was scratching at the kitchen door, as a dog might scratch to be let in.
“That’s the Follower,” said Phil. “Go and let him in.”
“But a Follower …”
“That’s all right,” said Phil. “I’ll take care of him. The bastard has been following me for years.”
“If it is all right …”
“Sure, it is all right. There’s something that he wants, but we can’t give it to him.”
Lambert went across the kitchen and opened the door. The Follower came in. Never looking at Lambert, he brushed past him into the living room and skidded to a halt in front of Phil.
“Finally,” shouted the Follower, “I have run you to your den. Now you cannot elude me. The indignities that you have heaped upon me—the learning of your atrocious language so I could converse with you, the always keeping close behind you, but never catching up, the hilarity of my acquaintances who viewed my obsession with you as an utter madness. But always you fled before me, afraid of me when there was no need of fear. Talk with you, that is all I wanted.”
“I was not afraid of you,” said Phil. “Why should I have been? You couldn’t lay a mitt upon me.”
“Clinging to the outside of a ship when the way was barred inside to get away from me! Riding in the cold and emptiness of space to get away from me. Surviving the cold and space—what kind of creature are you?”
“I only did that once,” said Phil, “and not to get away from you. I wanted to see what it would be like. I wanted to touch interstellar space, to find out what it was. But I never did find out. And I don’t mind telling you that once one got over the wonder and the terror of it, there was very little there. Before the ship touched down, I damn near died of boredom.”
The Follower was a brute, but something about him said he was more than simple brute. In appearance, he was a cross between a bear and an ape, but there was something manlike in him, too. He was a hairy creature, and the clothing that he wore was harness rather than clothing, and the stink of him was enough to make one gag.
“I followed you for years,” he bellowed, “to ask you a simple question, prepared well to pay you if you give me a useful answer. But you always slip my grasp. If nothing else, you pale and disappear. Why did you do that? Why not wait for me: Why not speak to me? You force me to subterfuge, you force me to set up ambush. In very sneaky and expensive manner, which I deplore, I learned position of your planet and location where you home, so I could come and wait for you to trap you in your den, thinking that even such as you surely must come home again. I prowl the deep woodlands while I wait, and I frighten inhabitants of here, without wishing to, except they blunder on me, and I watch your den and I wait for you, seeing this other of you and thinking he was you, but realizing, upon due observ
ation, he was not. So now …”
“Now just a minute,” said Phil. “Hold up. There is no reason to explain.”
“But explain you must, for to apprehend you, I am forced to very scurvy trick in which I hold great shame. No open and above board. No honesty. Although one thing I have deduced from my observations. You are no more, I am convinced, than an extension of this other.”
“And now,” said Phil, “you want to know how it was done. This is the question that you wish to ask.”
“I thank you,” said the Follower, “for your keen perception, for not forcing me to ask.”
“But first,” said Phil, “I have a question for you. If we could tell you how it might be done, if we were able to tell you and if you could turn this information to your use, what kind of use would you make of it?”
“Not myself,” said the Follower. “Not for myself alone, but for my people, for my race. You see, I never laughed at you; I did not jest about you as so many others did. I did not term you ghost or spook. I knew more to it than that. I saw ability that if rightly used.…”
“Now you’re getting around to it,” said Phil. “Now tell us the use.”
“My race,” said the Follower, “is concerned with many different art forms, working with crude tools and varying skills and in stubborn materials that often take unkindly to the shaping. But I tell myself that if each of us could project ourselves and use our second selves as medium for the art, we could shape as we could wish, creating art forms that are highly plastic, that can be worked over and over again until they attain perfection. And, once perfected, would be immune against time and pilferage.…”
“With never a thought,” said Phil, “as to its use in other ways. In war, in thievery …”
The Follower said, sanctimoniously, “You cast unworthy aspersions upon my noble race.”
“I am sorry if I do,” said Phil. “Perhaps it was uncouth of me. And now, as to your question, we simply cannot tell you. Or I don’t think that we can tell you. How about it, Ed?”
The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 5
