Ring Around the Sun Read online

  Ring Around the Sun

  Clifford D. Simak

  Clifford D. Simak

  Ring Around the Sun

  For Carson

  CHAPTER ONE

  VICKERS got up at an hour outrageous for its earliness, because Ann had phoned the night before to tell him about a man in New York she wanted him to meet.

  He had tried to argue about it.

  "I know it breaks into your schedule, Jay," she said "but I don't think this is something you can pass up."

  "I can't do it, Ann," he'd told her. "I've got the writing now and I can't get loose."

  "But this is big," Ann had said, "the biggest thing that has ever broken. They picked you to talk to first, ahead of all the other writers. They think you're the man to do it."

  "Publicity."

  "This is not publicity. This is something else."

  "Forget it — I won't meet the guy, whoever he is," he had said, and hung up. But here he was, making himself an early breakfast and getting ready to go into New York.

  He was frying eggs and bacon and making toast and trying to keep one eye on the coffee maker, which was temperamental, when the doorbell rang.

  He wrapped his robe around him and headed for the door.

  It might be the newsboy. He had been out on the regular collection day and the boy probably had seen the light in the kitchen.

  Or it might be his neighbor, the strange old man named Horton Flanders, who had moved in a year or so ago and who dropped over to spend an idle hour at the most unexpected and inconvenient times. He was an affable old man and distinguished looking, although slightly motheaten and shabby at the edges, pleasant to talk with and a good companion, even though Vickers might have wished that he were more orthodox in his visiting.

  It might be the newsboy or it might be scarcely be anyone else at this early hour.

  He opened the door and a little girl stood there, wrapped in a cherry-colored bathrobe and with bunny rabbit slippers on her feet. Her hair was tousled from a night of sleep, but her blue eyes sparkled at him and she smiled a pretty smile.

  "Good morning, Mr. Vickers," she said. "I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep and I saw the light burning in your kitchen and I thought maybe you was sick."

  "I'm all right, Jane," Vickers told her. "I'm just getting breakfast. Maybe you would like to eat with me."

  "Oh, yes," said Jane. "I was hoping maybe if you was eating breakfast you'd ask me to eat with you."

  "Your mother doesn't know you're here, does she?"

  "Mommy and Daddy are asleep," said Jane. "This is the day that Daddy doesn't work and they was out awful late last night. I heard them when they came in and Mommy was telling Daddy that he drank too much and she said she wouldn't go out with him, never again, if he drank that much, and Daddy…"

  "Jane," said Vickers, firmly, "I don't think your mommy and daddy would like you to be telling this."

  "Oh, they don't care. Mommy talks about it all the time. I heard her telling Mrs. Traynor she had half a mind to divorce my Daddy. Mr. Vickers, what is divorce?"

  "Now, I don't know," said Vickers. "I can't recollect I ever heard the word before. Maybe we oughtn't to talk about what your mommy says. And look, you got your slippers all wet crossing the grass."

  "It's kind of wet outside. The dew is awful heavy."

  "You come in," said Vickers, "and I'll get a towel and dry your feet and then we'll have some breakfast and call your mommy so she knows where you are."

  She came in and he closed the door.

  "You sit on that chair," he said, "and I'll get a towel. I'm afraid you might catch cold."

  "Mr. Vickers, you aren't married, are you?"

  "Why, no. It happens that I'm not."

  "Most everyone is married," said Jane. "Most everyone I know. Why aren't you married, Mr. Vickers?"

  "Why, I don't rightly know. Never found a girl, I guess."

  "There are lots of girls."

  "There was a girl," said Vickers. "A long time ago, there was a girl."

  It had been years since he had remembered sharply. He had forced the years to obscure the memory, to soften it and hide it away so that he did not think of it, and if he did think of it, to make it so far away and hazy that he could quit thinking of it.

  But here it was again.

  There had been a girl and an enchanted valley they had walked in, a springtime valley, he remembered, with the pink of wild crab apple blossoms flaming on the hills and the song of bluebird and of lark soaring in the sky, and there had been wild spring breeze that ruffled the water and blew along the grass so that the meadow seemed to flow and become a lake with whitecaps rolling on it.

  They had walked in the valley and there was no doubt that it was enchanted, for when he had gone back again the valley wasn't there — or at least not the same valley. It had been, he remembered, a very different valley.

  He had walked there twenty years ago and through all of twenty years he had hidden it away, back in the attic of his mind, yet here it was again, as fresh and shining as if it had been only yesterday.

  "Mr. Vickers," said Jane, "I think your toast is burning."

  CHAPTER TWO

  AFTER Jane had gone and he had washed the dishes, he remembered that he had intended for a week or more to phone Joe about the mice.

  "I got mice," Vickers told him.

  "You got what?"

  "Mice," said Vickers. "Little animals. They run around the place."

  "Now that's funny," said Joe. "A well-built place like yours. It shouldn't have no mice. You want me to come over and get rid of them?"

  "I guess you'll have to. I tried traps but these mice don't go for traps. Got a cat a while back and the cat left. Only stayed a day or two."

  "Now, that's a funny thing. Cats like places where they can catch a mouse."

  "This cat was crazy," said Vickers. "Acted like it was spooked. Walked around on tiptoe."

  "Cats is funny animals," Joe confided.

  "I'm going down to the city today. Figure you could do it while I'm gone?"

  "Sure thing," said Joe. "The exterminating business is kind of slack right now. I'll come over ten o'clock or so."

  "I'll leave the front door unlocked," said Vickers.

  He hung up the phone and got the paper off the stoop. At his desk, he laid down the paper and picked up the sheaf of manuscript, holding it in his hand, feeling the thickness of it and the weight of it, as if by its thickness and its weight he might reassure himself that what it held was good, that it was not labor wasted, that it said the many things he wished to say and said them well enough that other men and women might read the words and know the naked thought that lay behind the coldness of the print.

  He should not waste the day, he told himself. He should stay here and work. He should not go traipsing off to meet this man his agent wanted him to meet. But Ann had been insistent and had said that it was important and even when he had told her about the car being in the garage for repairs she still had insisted that he come. That story about the car had been untrue, of course, for he knew even as he told her that Eb would have it ready for him to make the trip.

  He looked at his watch and saw he had no more than half an hour until Eb's garage would open and half an hour was not worth his while to spend in writing.

  He picked up the paper and went out on the porch to read the morning's news.

  He thought about little Jane and what a sweet child she was and how she'd praised his cooking and had chattered on and on.

  You aren't married, Jane had said. Why aren't you married, Mr. Vickers?

  And he had said: once there was a girl. I remember now. Once there was a girl.

  Her name had been Kathleen Preston and she h
ad lived in a big brick house that sat up on a hill, a many-columned house with a wide porch and fanlights above the doors — an old house that had been built in the first flush of pioneer optimism when the country had been new, and the house had stood when the land had failed and ran away in ditches and left the hillsides scarred with gullied yellow clay.

  He had been young then, so young that it hurt him now to think of it; so young he could not understand that a girl who lived in an old ancestral home with fanlights above the doors and a pillared portico could not seriously consider a boy whose father farmed a worn-out farm where the corn grew slight and sickly. Or rather, perhaps, it had been her family that could not consider it, for she, too, must have been too young to fully understand. Perhaps she had quarreled with her family; perhaps there had been angry words and tears. That was something he had never known. For between that walk down the enchanted valley and the next time he had called they had bundled her off to a school somewhere in the east and that was the last he had seen or heard of her.

  For remembrance sake he had walked the valley again, alert to catch something that would spell out for him the enchantment of that day he had walked with her. But the crab apples had dropped their blossoms and the lark did not sing so well and the enchantment had fled into some never-never land. She had taken the magic with her.

  The paper fell out of his lap and he bent to pick it up. Opening it, he saw that the news was following the same drab pattern of all other days.

  The latest peace rumor still was going strong and the cold war still was in full cry.

  The cold war had been going on for years, of course, and gave promise of going on for many more. The last thirty years had seen crisis after crisis, rumor after rumor, near-war always threatening and big war never breaking out, until a cold-war-weary world yawned in the face of the new peace rumors and the crises that were a dime a dozen.

  Someone at an obscure college down in Georgia had set a new record at raw egg-gulping and a glamorous movie star was on the verge of changing husbands once again and the steel workers were threatening to strike.

  There was a lengthy feature article about missing persons and he read about half of it, all that he wanted to. It seemed that more and more people were dropping out of sight all the time, whole families at a time, and the police throughout the land were getting rather frantic. There always had been people who had disappeared, the article said, but they had been individuals. Now two or three families would disappear from the same community and two or three from another community and there was no trace of them at all. Usually they were from the poorer brackets. In the past, when individuals had dropped from sight there had usually been some reason for it, but in these cases of mass disappearances there seemed to be no reason beyond poverty and why one would or could disappear because of poverty was something the article writer and the people he had interviewed could not figure out.

  There was a headline that read: More Worlds Than One, Says Savant.

  He read part of the story:

  BOSTON, MASS. (AP) — There may be another earth just a second ahead of us and another world a second behind us and another world a second behind that one and another world a second behind… well, you get the idea.

  A sort of continuous chain of words, one behind the other.

  That is the theory of Dr. Vincent Aldridge.

  Vickers let the paper drop to the floor and sat looking out across the garden, rich with flowers and ripe with sunshine. There was peace here, in this garden corner of the world, if there were nowhere else, he thought. A peace compounded of many things, of golden sunshine and the talk of summer leaves quivering in the wind, of bird and flower and sundial, of picket fence that needed painting and an old pine tree dying quietly and tranquilly, taking its time to die, being friends with the grass and flowers and other trees all the while it died.

  Here there was no rumor and no threat; here was calm acceptance of the fact that time ran on, that winter came and summer, that sun would follow moon and that the life one held was a gift to be cherished rather than a right that one must wrest from other living things.

  Vickers glanced at his watch and saw that it was time to go.

  CHAPTER THREE

  EB, the garage man, hitched up his greasy britches and squinted his eyes against the smoke from the cigarette that hung from one corner of a grease-smeared mouth.

  "You see, it's this way, Jay," he explained. "I didn't fix your car."

  "I was going to the city," said Vickers, "but if my car's not fixed…"

  "You won't be needing that car anymore. Guess that's really why I didn't fix it. Told myself it would be just a waste of money."

  "It's not that bad," protested Vickers. "It may look shackle, but it still has lots of miles."

  "Sure, it's got some miles in it. But you're going to be this new Forever car."

  "Forever car?" Vickers repeated. "That's a queer name for a car."

  "No, it isn't," Eb told him, stubbornly. "It'll really last forever. That's why they call it the Forever car, because it lasts forever. Fellow was in here yesterday and told me about it and asked if I wanted to take it on and I said sure I would and this fellow, he said I was smart to take it on, because, he said, there isn't going to be any other car selling except this Forever car."

  "Now, wait a minute," said Vickers. "They may call it a Forever car, but it won't last forever. No car would last forever. Twenty years, maybe, or a lifetime, maybe, but not forever."

  "Jay," declared Eb, "that's what this fellow told me. 'Buy one of them, he says, 'and use it all your life. When you die, will it to your son and when he dies he can will it to his son and so on down the line. It's guaranteed to last forever. Anything goes wrong with it and they'll fix it up or give you a new one. All except the tires. You got to buy the tires. They wear out, just like on any other car. And paint, too. But the paint is guaranteed ten years. If it goes bad sooner than ten years you get a new job free."

  "It _might_ be possible," said Vickers, "but I hardly think so. I don't doubt a car could be made to last a lot longer than the ones do now. But if they were built too well, there'd be no replacement. It stands to reason a manufacturer in his right mind wouldn't build a car that would last forever. He'd put himself out of business. In the first place, it would cost too much…"

  "That's where you're wrong," Eb told him. "Fifteen hundred smackers, that's all you pay. No accessories to buy. No buildups. You get it complete for fifteen hundred."

  "Not much to look at, I suppose."

  "It's the classiest job you ever laid your eyes on. Fellow that here was driving one of them and I looked it over good. Any color that you want. Lots of chrome and stainless steel. All latest gadgets. And drive… man, that thing drives like a million dollars. But it might take some getting used to it. I went to open the hood to take a look at the motor and, you know, that hood doesn't open. 'What you doing there? this fellow asked me and I told him I wanted to look at the motor. 'There isn't any need to, this fellow says. 'Nothing ever goes wrong with it. You never need to get at it. 'But, I asked him, 'wnere do you put in the oil? And you know what he said? Well, sir, he said you don't put in no oil. 'All you put in is gasoline, he tells me.

  "I'll have a dozen or so of them in within a day or so," said Eb, "You better let me save you one."

  Vickers shook his head. "I'm short on money."

  "That's another thing about it. This company gives you good trade-in value. I figure I could give you a thousand for that wreck of yours."

  "It's not worth a thousand, Eb."

  "I know it's not. Fellow says, 'Give them more than they're worth. Don't worry about what you give them. We'll make it right with you. It doesn't exactly seem the smart way to do business, come to think about it, but if that's the way they want to operate I won't say a word against it."

  "I'd have to think about it."

  "That would leave five hundred for you to pay. And I can make it easy on you. Fellow said I should make it easy. S
ays they aren't so much interested in the money right now as getting a few of them Forever cars out, running on the road."

  "I don't like the sound of it," protested Vickers. "Here this company springs up over night with no announcement at all with a brand new car. You'd think there would have been something in the papers about it. If I were putting out a new car, I'd plaster the country with advertising… big ads in the newspapers, announcements on television, billboards every mile or so."

  "Well, you know," said Eb, "I thought of that one, too. I said, look, you fellows want me to sell this car and how am I going to sell it when you aren't advertising it? How am I going to sell it when no one knows about it? And he said that they figured the car was so good everyone would up and tell everybody else. Said there isn't any advertising that can beat word of mouth. Said they'd rather save the money they put in advertising and cut down the cost of the car. Said there was no reason to make the consumer pay for the cost of an advertising campaign."

  "I can't understand it."

  "It does sort of hit you that way," Eb admitted. "This gang that's putting out the Forever car isn't losing any money on it, you can bet your boots on that. Be crazy if they did. And if they aren't losing any money at it, can you imagine what the rest of them companies have been making all these years, two or three thousand for a pile of junk that falls apart second time you take it out? Makes you shiver to think of the money they been making, don't it?"

  "When you get the cars in," said Vickers, "I'll be down to take a look at them. We might make a deal, at that."

  "Sure," said Eb. "Be sure to do that. You say you was going to the city?"

  Vickers nodded.

  "Be a bus along any minute now," said Eb. "Catch it down at the drugstore corner. Get you there in a couple of hours. Those fellows really wheel it."

  "I guess I could take a bus. I never thought of it."

  "I'm sorry about the car," said Eb. "If I'd known you was going to use it, I'd have fixed her up. Not much wrong with it. But I wanted to see what you thought about this other deal before I run you up a bill."