The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 14

  “You’ve worked with it before?”

  “In a museum.”

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  Peter hesitated—then told about himself.

  “But why are you here?” the colonel asked.

  “Have you ever been in a hospital, Colonel? Have you ever thought what it would be like to die there?”

  The colonel nodded. “I can see your point. But here you’ll have no—”

  “I won’t wait that long.”

  “Yes, yes,” the colonel said. “I see.”

  “Colonel,” said the major. “Look at this, sir, if you will. This symbolism is the same …”

  The colonel snatched it from his hands and looked.

  “The same as on the letterhead!” he shouted.

  The colonel lifted his head and stared at Peter, as if it had been the first time he had seen him, as if he were surprised at seeing him.

  There was, suddenly, a gun in the major’s hand, pointing at Peter, its muzzle a cold and steady eye.

  Peter tried to throw himself aside.

  He was too late.

  The major shot him down.

  Peter fell for a million years through a wool-gray nothingness that screamed and he knew it must be a dream, an endless atavistic dream of falling, brought down through all the years from incredibly remote forebears who had dwelt in trees and had lived in fear of falling. He tried to pinch himself to awaken from the dream, but he couldn’t do it, since he had no hands to pinch with, and, after a time, it became apparent that he had no body to pinch. He was a disembodied consciousness hurtling through a gulf which seemed to have no boundaries.

  He fell for a million years through the void that seemed to scream at him. At first the screaming soaked into him and filled his soul, since he had no body, with a terrible agony that went on and on, never quite reaching the breaking point that would send him into the release of insanity. But he got used to it after a time and as soon as he did, the screaming stopped and he plunged down through space in a silence that was more dreadful than the screaming.

  He fell forever and forever and then it seemed that forever ended, for he was at rest and no longer falling.

  He saw a face. It was a face from incredibly long ago, a face that he once had seen and had long forgotten, and he searched back along his memory to try to identify it.

  He couldn’t see it too clearly, for it seemed to keep bobbing around so he couldn’t pin it down. He tried and tried and couldn’t and he closed his eyes to shut the face away.

  “Chaye,” a voice said. “Peter Chaye.”

  “Go away,” said Peter.

  The voice went away.

  He opened his eyes again and the face was there, clearer now and no longer bobbing.

  It was the colonel’s face.

  He shut his eyes again, remembering the steady eye of the gun the major had held. He’d jumped aside, or tried to, and he had been too slow. Something had happened and he’d fallen for a million years and here he was, with the colonel looking at him.

  He’d been shot. That was the answer, of course. The major had shot him and he was in a hospital. But where had he been hit? Arm? Both arms seemed to be all right. Leg? Both legs were all right, too. No pain. No bandages. No casts.

  The colonel said: “He came to for just a minute, Doc, and now he’s off again.”

  “He’ll be all right,” said Doc. “Just give him time. You gave him too big a charge, that’s all. It’ll take a little time.”

  “We must talk to him.”

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  Then: “You’re absolutely sure he’s human?”

  “We’ve gone over every inch of him,” said Doc. “If he isn’t human, he’s too good an imitation for us ever to find out.”

  “He told me he had cancer,” the colonel said. “Claimed he was dying of cancer. Don’t you see, if he wasn’t human, if there was something wrong, he could always try to make it look …”

  “He hasn’t any cancer. Not a sign of it. No sign he ever had it. No sign he ever will.”

  Even with his eyes shut, Peter felt that he was agape with disbelief and amazement. He forced his eyes to stay closed, afraid that this was a trick.

  “That other doctor,” the colonel said, “told Peter Chaye four months ago he had six more months to live. He told him …”

  Doc said, “Colonel, I won’t even try to explain it. All I can tell you is that the man lying on that bed hasn’t got cancer. He’s as healthy a man as you would wish to find.”

  “It isn’t Peter Chaye, then,” the colonel stated in a dogged voice. “It’s something that took over Peter Chaye or duplicated Peter Chaye or …”

  Doc said, “Now, now, Colonel. Let’s stick to what we know.”

  “You’re sure he’s a man, Doc?”

  “I’m sure he’s a human being, if that is what you mean.”

  “No little differences? Just one seemingly unimportant deviation from the human norm?”

  “None,” Doc said, “and even if there were, it wouldn’t prove what you are after. There could be minor mutational difference in anyone. The human body doesn’t always run according to a blueprint.”

  “There were differences in all that stuff the machine gave away. Little differences that came to light only on close examination—but differences that spelled out a margin between human and alien manufacture.”

  “All right, then, so there were differences. So those things were made by aliens. I still tell you this man is a human being.”

  “It all ties in so neatly,” the colonel declared. “Chaye goes out and buys this place—this old, abandoned farm. He’s eccentric as hell by the standards of that neighborhood. By the very fact of his eccentricity, he invites attention, which might be undesirable, but at the same time his eccentricity might be used to cover up and smooth over anything he did out of the ordinary. It would be just somebody like him who’d supposedly find a strange machine. It would be …”

  “You’re building up a case,” said Doc, “without anything to go on. You asked for one little difference in him to base your cockeyed theory on—no offense, but that’s how I, as a doctor, see it. Well, now let’s have one little fact—fact, mind you, not guess—to support this idea of yours.”

  “What was in that barn?” demanded the colonel. “That’s what I want to know. Did Chaye build that machine in there? Was that why it was destroyed?”

  “The sheriff destroyed the barn,” the doctor said. “Chaye had nothing to do with it.”

  “But who gave the gun to the sheriff? Chaye’s machine, that’s who. And it would be an easy matter of suggestion, mind control, hypnotism, whatever you want to call it …”

  “Let’s get back to facts. You used an anesthetic gun on this man. You’ve held him prisoner. By your orders, he had been subjected to intensive examination, a clear invasion of his privacy. I hope to God he never brings you into court. He could throw the book at you.”

  “I know,” the colonel admitted reluctantly. “But we have to bust this thing. We must find out what it is. We have got to get that bomb back!”

  “The bomb’s what worries you.”

  “Hanging up there,” the colonel said, sounding as if he’d shuddered. “Just hanging up there!”

  “I have to get along,” replied the doctor. “Take it easy, Colonel.”

  The doctor’s footsteps went out the door and down the corridor, fading away. The colonel paced up and down a while then sat down heavily in a chair.

  Peter lay in bed, and one thought crashed through his brain, one thought again and again:

  I’m going to live!

  But he hadn’t been.

  He had been ready for the day when the pain finally became too great to bear.

 
He had picked his ground to spend his final days, to make his final stand.

  And now he had been reprieved. Now, somehow, he had been given back his life.

  He lay in the bed, fighting against excitement, against a growing tenseness, trying to maintain the pretense that he still was under the influence of whatever he’d been shot with.

  An anesthetic gun, the doctor had said. Something new, something he had never heard of. And yet somewhere there was a hint of it. Something, he remembered, about dentistry—a new technique that dentists used to desensitize the gums, a fine stream of anesthetic sprayed against the gums. Something like that, only hundreds or thousands of times stronger?

  Shot and brought here and examined because of some wild fantasy lurking in the mind of a G-2 colonel.

  Fantasy? He wondered. Unwitting, unsuspecting, could he have played a part? It was ridiculous, of course. For he remembered nothing he had done or said or even thought which gave him a clue to any part he might have played in the machine’s coming to the Earth.

  Could cancer be something other than disease? Some uninvited guest, perhaps, that came and lived within a human body? A clever alien guest who came from far away, across the unguessed light-years?

  And that, he knew, was fantasy to match the colonel’s fantasy, a malignant nightmare of distrust that dwelt within the human mind, an instinctive defense mechanism that conditioned the race to expect the worst and to arm against it.

  There was nothing feared so much as the unknown factor, nothing which one must guard against so much as the unexplained.

  We have to bust this thing, the colonel had said. We must find out what it is.

  And that, of course, was the terror of it—that they had no way of knowing what it was.

  He stirred at last, very deliberately, and the colonel spoke.

  “Peter Chaye,” he said.

  “Yes, what is it, Colonel?”

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “All right, talk to me.”

  He sat up in the bed and saw that he was in a hospital room. It had the stark, antiseptic quality, the tile floor, the colorless walls, the utilitarian look—and the bed on which he lay was a hospital bed.

  “How do you feel?” the colonel asked.

  “Not so hot,” confessed Peter.

  “We were a little rough on you, but we couldn’t take a chance. There was the letter, you see, and the slot machines and the stamp machines and all the other things and …”

  “You said something about a letterhead.”

  “What do you know about that, Chaye?”

  “I don’t know a thing.”

  “It came to the President,” said the colonel. “A month or so ago. And a similar one went to every other administrative head on the entire Earth.”

  “Saying?”

  “That’s the hell of it. It was written in no language known anywhere on Earth. But there was one line—one line on all the letters—that you could read. It said: ‘By the time you have this deciphered, you’ll be ready to act logically.’ And that was all anybody could read—one line in the native language of every country that got a copy of the letter. The rest was in gibberish, for all we could make of it.”

  “You haven’t deciphered it?”

  He could see the colonel sweating. “Not even a single character, much less a word.”

  Peter reached out a hand to the bedside table and lifted the carafe, tipped it above the glass. There was nothing in it.

  The colonel heaved himself out of his chair. “I’ll get you a drink of water.”

  He picked up the glass and opened the bathroom door.

  “I’ll let it run a while and get it cold,” he said.

  But Peter scarcely heard him, for he was staring at the door. There was a bolt on it and if—

  The water started running and the colonel raised his voice to be heard above it.

  “That’s about the time we started finding the machines,” he said. “Can you imagine it? A cigarette-vending machine and you could buy cigarettes from it, but it was more than that. It was something watching you. Something that studied the people and the way they lived. And the stamp machines and the slot machines and all the other mechanical contrivances that we have set up. Not machines, but watchers. Watching all the time. Watching and learning …”

  Peter swung his legs out of bed and touched the floor. He approached swiftly and silently on bare feet and slammed the door, then reached up and slid the bolt. It snicked neatly into place.

  “Hey!” the colonel shouted.

  Clothes?

  They might be in the closet.

  Peter leaped at it and wrenched the door open and there they were, hung upon the hangers.

  He ripped off the hospital gown, snatched at his trousers and pulled them on.

  Shirt, now! In a drawer.

  And shoes? There on the closet floor. Don’t take time to tie them.

  The colonel was pushing and hammering at the door, not yelling yet. Later he would, but right now he was intent on saving all the face he could. He wouldn’t want to advertise immediately the fact that he’d been tricked.

  Peter felt through his pockets. His wallet was gone. So was everything else—his knife, his watch, his keys. More than likely they’d taken all of it and put it in the office safe when he’d been brought in.

  No time to worry about any of them. The thing now was to get away.

  He went out the door and down the corridor, carefully not going too fast. He passed a nurse, but she scarcely glanced at him.

  He found a stairway door and opened it. Now he could hurry just a little more. He went down the stairs three at a time, shoelaces clattering.

  The stairs, he told himself, were fairly safe. Almost no one would use them when there were the elevators. He stopped and bent over for a moment and tied the laces.

  The floor numbers were painted above each of the doors, so he knew where he was. At the ground floor, he entered the corridor again. So far, there seemed to be no alarms, although any minute now the colonel would start to raise a ruckus.

  Would they try to stop him at the door? Would there be someone to question him? Would—

  A basket of flowers stood beside a door. He glanced up and down the corridor. There were several people, but they weren’t looking at him. He scooped up the flowers.

  At the door, he said to the attendant who sat behind the desk: “Mistake. Wrong flowers.”

  She smiled sourly, but made no move to stop him.

  Outside, he put the flowers down on the steps and walked rapidly away.

  An hour later, he knew that he was safe. He knew also that he was in a city thirty miles away from where he wanted to go and that he had no money and that he was hungry and his feet were sore from walking on the hard and unyielding concrete of the sidewalks.

  He found a park and sat down on a bench. A little distance away, a group of old men were playing checkers at a table. A mother wheeled her baby. A young man sat on a nearby bench, listening to a tiny radio.

  The radio said: “… apparently the building is completed. There has been no sign of it growing for the last eighteen hours. At the moment, it measures a thousand stories high and covers more than a hundred acres. The bomb, which was dropped two days ago, still floats there above it, held in suspension by some strange force. Artillery is standing by, waiting for the word to fire, but the word has not come through. Many think that since the bomb could not get through, shells will have no better chance, if any at all.

  “A military spokesman, in fact, has said that the big guns are mere precautionary measures, which may be all right, but it certainly doesn’t explain why the bomb was dropped. There is a rising clamor, not only in Congress, but throughout the world, to determine why an attempt was made at bombing. There has as yet been no hostile move directed from the
building. The only damage so far reported has been the engulfment by the building of the farm home of Peter Chaye, the man who found the machine.

  “All trace has been lost of Chaye since three days ago, when he suffered an attack of some sort and was taken from his home. It is believed that he may be in military custody. There is wide speculation on what Chaye may or may not know. It is entirely likely that he is the only man on Earth who can shed any light on what has happened on his farm.

  “Meanwhile, the military guard has been tightened around the scene and a corridor of some eighteen miles in depth around it has been evacuated. It is known that two delegations of scientists have been escorted through the lines. While no official announcement has been made, there is good reason to believe they learned little from their visits. What the building is, who or what has engineered its construction, if you can call the inside-out process by which it grew construction, or what may be expected next are all fields of groundless speculation. There is plenty of that, naturally, but no one has yet come up with what might be called an explanation.

  “The world’s press wires are continuing to pile up reams of copy, but even so there is little actual, concrete knowledge—few facts that can be listed one, two, three right down the line.

  “There is little other news of any sort and perhaps it’s just as well, since there is no room at the moment in the public interest for anything else but this mysterious building. Strangely, however, there is little other news. As so often happens when big news breaks, all other events seem to wait for some other time to happen. The polio epidemic is rapidly subsiding; there is no major crime news. In the world’s capitols, of course, all legislative action is at a complete standstill, with the governments watching closely the developments at the building.

  “There is a rising feeling at many of these capitols that the building is not of mere national concern, that decisions regarding it must be made at an international level. The attempted bombing has resulted in some argument that we, as the nation most concerned, cannot be trusted to act in a calm, dispassionate way, and that an objective world viewpoint is necessary for an intelligent handling of the situation.”

  Peter got up from his bench and walked away. He’d been taken from his home three days ago, the radio had said. No wonder he was starved.