The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 24

  Grant hunted in his pocket, found his pipe, jammed tobacco in the bowl.

  “There is something else,” he said.

  “Eh,” asked Webster.

  “There is something else about this census. They’d take it anyhow, perhaps, because a picture of Earth’s population must always be an asset, a piece of handy knowledge. But that isn’t all.”

  “Mutants,” said Webster.

  Grant nodded. “That’s right. I hardly expected anyone to guess it.”

  “I work with mutants,” Webster pointed out. “My whole life is bound up with mutations.”

  “Queer bits of culture have been turning up,” said Grant. “Stuff that has no precedent. Literary forms which bear the unmistakable imprint of fresh personalities. Music that has broken away from traditional expression. Art that is like nothing ever seen before. And most of it anonymous or at least hidden under pseudonyms.”

  Webster laughed. “Such a thing, of course, is utter mystery to the World Committee.”

  “It isn’t that so much as something else,” Grant explained. “The Committee is not so concerned with art and literature as it is with other things—things that don’t show up. If there is a backwoods renaissance taking place, it would first come to notice, naturally, through new art and literary forms. But a renaissance is not concerned entirely with art and literature.”

  Webster sank even lower in his chair, cupped his hands beneath his chin.

  “I think I see,” he said, “what you are driving at.”

  They sat for long minutes in silence broken only by the crackling of the fire, by the ghostly whisper of an autumn wind in the trees outside.

  “There was a chance once,” said Webster, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “A chance for new viewpoints, for something that might have wiped out the muddle of four thousand years of human thought. A man muffed that chance.”

  Grant stirred uncomfortably, then sat rigid, afraid Webster might have seen him move.

  “That man,” said Webster, “was my grandfather.”

  Grant knew he must say something, that he could not continue to sit there, unspeaking.

  “Juwain may have been wrong,” he said. “He might not have found a new philosophy.”

  “That is a thought,” declared Webster, “we have used to console ourselves. And yet, it is unlikely. Juwain was a great Martian philosopher, perhaps the greatest Mars had ever known. If he could have lived, there is no doubt in my mind he would have developed that new philosophy. But he didn’t live. He didn’t live because my grandfather couldn’t go to Mars.”

  “It wasn’t your grandfather’s fault,” said Grant. “He tried to. Agoraphobia is a thing that a man can’t fight—”

  Webster waved the words aside. “That is over and done with. It is a thing that cannot be recaptured. We must accept that and go on from there. And since it was my family, since it was grandfather—”

  Grant stared, shaken by the thought that occurred to him. “The dogs! That’s why—”

  “Yes, the dogs,” said Webster.

  From far away, in the river bottoms, came a crying sound, one with the wind that talked in the trees outside.

  “A raccoon,” said Webster. “The dogs will hear him and be rearing to get out.”

  The cry came again, closer it seemed, although that must have been imagination.

  Webster had straightened in the chair, was leaning forward, staring at the flames.

  “After all, why not?” he asked. “A dog has a personality. You can sense that in every one you meet. No two are exactly alike in mood and temperament. All of them are intelligent, in varying degrees. And that is all that’s needed, a conscious personality and some measure of intelligence.

  “They didn’t get an even break, that’s all. They had two handicaps. They couldn’t talk and they couldn’t walk erect and because they couldn’t walk erect they had no chance to develop hands. But for speech and hands, we might be dogs and dogs be men.”

  “I’d never thought of it like that,” said Grant. “Not of your dogs as a thinking race—”

  “No,” said Webster, and there was a trace of bitterness running in his words. “No, of course, you didn’t. You thought of them as most of the rest of the world still thinks of them. As curiosities, as sideshow animals, as funny pets. Pets that can talk with you.

  “But it’s more than that, Grant. I swear to you it is. Thus far Man has come alone. One thinking, intelligent race all by itself. Think of how much farther, how much faster it might have gone had there been two races, two thinking, intelligent races, working together. For, you see, they would not think alike. They’d check their thoughts against one another. What one couldn’t think of, the other could. The old story of two heads.

  “Think of it, Grant. A different mind than the human mind, but one that will work with the human mind. That will see and understand things the human mind cannot, that will develop, if you will, philosophies the human mind could not.”

  He spread his hands toward the fire, long fingers with bone-hard, merciless knuckles.

  “They couldn’t talk and I gave them speech. It was not easy, for a dog’s tongue and throat are not designed to speak. But surgery did it … an expedient at first … surgery and grafting. But now … now, I hope, I think… it is too soon to say—”

  Grant was leaning forward, tensed.

  “You mean the dogs are passing on the changes you have made. That there are hereditary evidences of the surgical corrections?”

  Webster shook his head. “It is too soon to say. Another twenty years, maybe I can tell you.”

  He lifted the brandy bottle from the table, held it out.

  “Thanks,” said Grant.

  “I am a poor host,” Webster told him. “You should have helped yourself.”

  He raised the glass against the fire. “I had good material to work with. A dog is smart. Smarter than you think. The ordinary, run of the mill dog recognizes fifty words or more. A hundred is not unusual. Add another hundred and he has a working vocabulary. You noticed, perhaps, the simple words that Nathaniel used. Almost basic English.”

  Grant nodded. “One and two syllables. He told me there were a lot of words he couldn’t say.”

  “There is much more to do,” said Webster. “So much more to do. Reading, for example. A dog doesn’t see as you and I do. I have been experimenting with lenses—correcting their eyesight so they can see as we do. And if that fails, there’s still another way. Man must visualize the way a dog sees—learn to print books that dogs can read.”

  “The dogs,” asked Grant, “what do they think of it?”

  “The dogs?” said Webster. “Believe it or not, Grant, they’re having the time of their merry lives.”

  He stared into the fire.

  “God bless their hearts,” he said.

  Following Jenkins, Grant climbed the stairs to bed, but as they passed a partially opened door a voice hailed them.

  “That you, stranger?”

  Grant stopped, jerked around.

  Jenkins said, in a whisper, “That’s the old gentleman, sir. Often he cannot sleep.”

  “Yes,” called Grant.

  “Sleepy?” asked the voice.

  “Not very,” Grant told him.

  “Come in for a while,” the old man invited.

  Thomas Webster sat propped up in bed, striped nightcap on his head. He saw Grant staring at it.

  “Getting bald,” he rasped. “Don’t feel comfortable unless I got something on. Can’t wear my hat to bed.”

  He shouted at Jenkins. “What you standing there for? Don’t you see he needs a drink?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jenkins, and disappeared.

  “Sit down,” said Thomas Webster. “Sit down and listen for a while. Talking will help me go to sleep. And, besides, we
don’t see new faces every day.”

  Grant sat down.

  “What do you think of that son of mine?” the old man asked.

  Grant started at the unusual question. “Why, I think he’s splendid. The work he’s doing with the dogs—”

  The old man chuckled. “Him and his dogs! Ever tell you about the time Nathaniel tangled with a skunk? Of course, I haven’t. Haven’t said more than a word or two to you.”

  He ran his hands along the bed covering, long fingers picking at the fabric nervously.

  “Got another son, you know. Allen. Call him Al. Tonight he’s the farthest from Earth that Man has ever been. Heading for the stars.”

  Grant nodded. “I know. I read about it. The Alpha Centauri expedition.”

  “My father was a surgeon,” said Thomas Webster. “Wanted me to be one, too. Almost broke his heart, I guess, when I didn’t take to it. But if he could know, he’d be proud of us tonight.”

  “You mustn’t worry about your son,” said Grant. “He—”

  The old man’s glare silenced him. “I built that ship myself. Designed it, watched it grow. If it’s just a matter of navigating space, it’ll get where it is going. And the kid is good. He can ride that crate through hell itself.”

  He hunched himself straighter in the bed, knocking his nightcap askew against the piled-up pillows.

  “And I got another reason to think he’ll get there and back. Didn’t think much about it at the time, but lately I’ve been recalling it, thinking it over, wondering if it mightn’t mean… well, if it might not be—”

  He gasped a bit for breath. “Mind you, I’m not superstitious.”

  “Of course you’re not,” said Grant.

  “You bet I’m not,” said Webster.

  “A sign of some sort, perhaps,” suggested Grant. “A feeling. A hunch.”

  “None of those,” declared the old man. “An almost certain knowledge that destiny must be with me. That I was meant to build a ship that would make the trip. That someone or something decided it was about time Man got out to the stars and took a hand to help him along a bit.”

  “You sound as if you’re talking about an actual incident,” said Grant. “As if there were some positive happening that makes you think the expedition will succeed.”

  “You bet your boots,” said Webster. “That’s just exactly what I mean. It happened twenty years ago, out on the lawn in front of this very house.”

  He pulled himself even straighter, gasped for breath, wheezing.

  “I was stumped, you understand. The dream was broken. Years spent for nothing. The basic principle I had evolved to get the speed necessary for interstellar flight simply wouldn’t work. And the worst of it was, I knew it was almost right. I knew there was just one little thing, one theoretical change that must be made. But I couldn’t find it.

  “So I was sitting out there on the lawn, feeling sorry for myself, with a sketch of the plan in front of me. I lived with it, you see. I carried it everywhere I went, figuring maybe that by just looking at it, the thing that was wrong would pop into my mind. You know how it does, sometimes.”

  Grant nodded.

  “While I was sitting there a man came along. One of the ridge runners. You know what a ridge runner is?”

  “Sure,” said Grant.

  “Well, this fellow came along. Kind of limber-jointed chap, ambling along as if he didn’t have a trouble in the world. He stopped and looked over my shoulder and asked me what I had.

  “‘Spaceship drive,’ I told him.

  “He reached down and took it and I let him have it. After all, what was the use? He couldn’t understand a thing about it and it was no good, anyhow.

  “And then he handed it back to me and jabbed his finger at one place. ‘That’s your trouble,’ he said. And then he turned and galloped off and I sat staring after him, too done in to say a single word, to even call him back.”

  The old man sat bolt upright in the bed, staring at the wall, nightcap canted crazily. Outside the wind sucked along the eaves with hollow hooting. And in that well-lighted room, there seemed to be shadows, although Grant knew there weren’t any.

  “Did you ever find him?” asked Grant.

  The old man shook his head. “Hide nor hair,” he said.

  Jenkins came through the door with a glass, set it on the bedside table.

  “I’ll be back, sir,” he said to Grant, “to show you to your room.”

  “No need of it,” said Grant. “Just tell me where it is.”

  “If you wish, sir,” said Jenkins. “It’s the third one down. I’ll turn on the light and leave the door ajar.”

  They sat, listening to the robot’s feet go down the hall.

  The old man glanced at the glass of whiskey, cleared his throat.

  “I wish now,” he said, “I’d had Jenkins bring me one.”

  “Why, that’s all right,” said Grant. “Take this one. I don’t really need it.”

  “Sure you don’t?”

  “Not at all.”

  The old man stretched out his hand, took a sip, sighed gustily.

  “Now that’s what I call a proper mix,” he said. “Doctor makes Jenkins water mine.”

  There was something in the house that got under one’s skin. Something that made one feel like an outsider—uncomfortable and naked in the quiet whisper of its walls.

  Sitting on the edge of his bed, Grant slowly unlaced his shoes, dropped them on the carpet.

  A robot who had served the family for four generations, who talked of men long dead as if he had brought them a glass of whiskey only yesterday. An old man who worried about a ship that slid through the space-darkness beyond the solar system. Another man who dreamed of another race, a race that might go hand in paw with man down the trail of destiny.

  And over it all, almost unspoken and yet unmistakable, the shadow of Jerome A. Webster—the man who had failed a friend, a surgeon who had failed his trust.

  Juwain, the Martian philosopher, had died, on the eve of a great discovery, because Jerome A. Webster couldn’t leave this house, because agoraphobia chained him to a plot a few miles square.

  On stockinged feet, Grant crossed to the table where Jenkins had placed his pack. Loosening the straps, he opened it, brought out a thick portfolio. Back at the bed again, he sat down and hauled out sheafs of papers, thumbed through them.

  Records, hundreds of sheets of records. The story of hundreds of human lives set down on paper. Not only the things they told him or the questions that they answered, but dozens of other little things—things he had noted down from observation, from sitting and watching, from living with them for an hour or day.

  For the people that he ferreted out in these tangled hills accepted him. It was his business that they should accept him. They accepted him because he came on foot, briar-scratched and weary, with a pack upon his shoulder. To him clung none of the modernity that would have set him apart from them, made them suspicious of him. It was a tiresome way to make a census, but it was the only way to make the kind the World Committee wanted—and needed.

  For somewhere, sometime, studying sheets like these that lay upon the bed, some man like him would find a thing he sought, would find a clue to some life that veered from the human pattern. Some betraying quirk of behaviorism that would set out one life against all the others.

  Human mutations were not uncommon, of course. Many of them were known, men who held high position in the world. Most of the World Committee members were mutants, but, like the others, their mutational qualities and abilities had been modified and qualified by the pattern of the world, by unconscious conditioning that had shaped their thoughts and reactions into some conformity with other fellow men.

  There had always been mutants, else the race would not have advanced. But until the last hundred years or so they had not
been recognized as such. Before that they had merely been great businessmen or great scientists or great crooks. Or perhaps eccentrics who had gained no more than scorn or pity at the hands of a race that would not tolerate divergence from the norm.

  Those who had been successful had adapted themselves to the world around them, had bent their greater mental powers into the pattern of acceptable action. And this dulled their usefulness, limited their capacity, hedged their ability with restrictions set up to fit less extraordinary people.

  Even as today the known mutant’s ability was hedged, unconsciously, by a pattern that had been set—a groove of logic that was a terrible thing.

  But somewhere in the world there were dozens, probably hundreds, of other humans who were just a little more than human—persons whose lives had been untouched by the rigidity of complex human life. Their ability would not be hedged, they would know no groove of logic.

  From the portfolio Grant brought out a pitifully thin sheaf of papers, clipped together, read the title of the script almost reverently:

  “Unfinished Philosophical Proposition and Related Notes of Juwain.”

  It would take a mind that knew no groove of logic, a mind unhampered by the pattern of four thousand years of human thought, to carry on the torch the dead hand of the Martian philosopher had momentarily lifted. A torch that lit the way to a new concept of life and purpose, that showed a path that was easier and straighter. A philosophy that would have put mankind ahead a hundred thousand years in two short generations.

  Juwain had died and in this very house a man had lived out his haunted years, listening to the voice of his dead friend, shrinking from the censure of a cheated race.

  A stealthy scratch came at the door. Startled, Grant stiffened, listened. It came again. Then, a little, silky whine.

  Swiftly Grant stuffed the papers back in the portfolio, strode to the door. As he opened it, Nathaniel oozed in, like a sliding black shadow.

  “Oscar,” he said, “doesn’t know I’m here. Oscar would give it to me if he knew I was.”

  “Who’s Oscar?”