The Works of Clifford D. Simak Volume Two Page 64

  “That is it, exactly. There had been a time, many years ago, when I thought of writing papers for submissions to some of the scientific journals. Not the medical journals, naturally, for I know nothing about medicine. The drugs are there, of course, lying on the shelf, with directions for their use, but they are merely so many pills or powders or ointments, or whatever they may be. But there were other things I knew of, other things I’d learned. Not too much about them, naturally, but at least some hints in some new directions. Enough that someone could pick them up and go on from there. Someone who might know what to do with them.”

  “But look here,” David said, “that wouldn’t have worked out. You have no technical nor research background, no educational record. You’re not tied up with any school or college. The journals just don’t publish you unless you can prove yourself.”

  “I realize that, of course. That’s why I never wrote the papers. I knew there was no use. You can’t blame the journals. They must be responsible. Their pages aren’t open to just anyone. And even if they had viewed the papers with enough respect to want to publish them, they would have had to find out who I was. And that would have led straight back to the station.”

  “But even if you could have gotten away with it,” David pointed out, “you’d still not have been clear. You said a while ago you had a loyalty to Galactic Central.”

  “If,” said Enoch, “in this particular case I could have got away with it, it might have been all right. If you just threw out ideas and let some Earth scientists develop them, there’d be no harm done Galactic Central. The main problem, of course, would be not to reveal the source.”

  “Even so,” said David, “there’d be little you actually could tell them. What I mean is that generally you haven’t got enough to go on. So much of this galactic knowledge is off the beaten track.”

  “I know,” said Enoch. “The mental engineering of Mankalinen III, for one thing. If the Earth could know of that, our people undoubtedly could find a clue to the treatment of the neurotic and the mentally disturbed. We could empty all the institutions and we could tear them down or use them for something else. There’d be no need of them. But no one other than the people out on Mankalinen III could ever tell us of it. I only know they are noted for their mental engineering, but that is all I know. I haven’t the faintest inkling of what it’s all about. It’s something that you’d have to get from the people out there.”

  “What you are really talking of,” said Mary, “are all the nameless sciences—the ones that no human has ever thought about.”

  “Like us, perhaps,” said David.

  “David!” Mary cried.

  “There is no sense,” said David angrily, “in pretending we are people.”

  “But you are,” said Enoch tensely. “You are people to me. You are the only people that I have. What is the matter, David?”

  “I think,” said David, “that the time has come to say what we really are. That we are illusion. That we are created and called up. That we exist only for one purpose, to come and talk with you, to fill in for the real people that you cannot have.”

  “Mary,” Enoch cried, “you don’t think that way, too! You can’t think that way!”

  He reached out his arms to her and then he let them drop—terrified at the realization of what he’d been about to do. It was the first time he’d ever tried to touch her. It was the first time, in all the years, that he had forgotten.

  “I am sorry, Mary. I should not have done that.”

  Her eyes were bright with tears.

  “I wish you could,” she said. “Oh, how I wish you could!”

  “David,” he said, not turning his head.

  “David left,” said Mary.

  “He won’t be back,” said Enoch.

  Mary shook her head.

  “What is the matter, Mary? What is it all about? What have I done!”

  “Nothing,” Mary said, “except that you made us too much like people. So that we became more human, until we were entirely human. No longer puppets, no longer pretty dolls, but really actual people. I think David must resent it—not that he is people, but that being people, he is still a shadow. It did not matter when we were dolls or puppets, for we were not human then. We had no human feeling.”

  “Mary, please,” he said. “Mary, please forgive me.”

  She leaned toward him and her face was lighted by deep tenderness. “There is nothing to forgive,” she said. “Rather, I suppose, we should thank you for it. You created us out of a love of us and a need of us and it is wonderful to know that you are loved and needed.”

  “But I don’t create you any more,” Enoch pleaded. “There was a time, long ago, I had to. But not any longer. Now you come to visit me of your own free will.”

  How many years? he wondered. It must be all of fifty. And Mary had been the first, and David had been second. Of all the others of them, they had been the first and were the closet and the dearest.

  And before that, before he’d even tried, he’d spent other years in studying that nameless science stemming from the thaumaturgists of Alphard XXII.

  There had been a day and a state of mind when it would have been black magic, but it was not black magic. Rather, it was the orderly manipulation of certain natural aspects of the universe as yet quite unsuspected by the human race. Perhaps aspects that Man never would discover. For there was not, at least at the present moment, the necessary orientation of the scientific mind to initiate the research that must precede discovery.

  “David felt,” said Mary, “that we could not go on forever, playing out our little sedate visits. There had to be a time when we faced up to what we really are.”

  “And the rest of them?”

  “I am sorry, Enoch. The rest of them as well.”

  “But you? How about you, Mary?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It is different with me. I love you very much.”

  “And I …”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. Don’t you understand! I’m in love with you.”

  He sat stricken, staring at her, and there was a great roaring in the world, as if he were standing still and the world and time were rushing swiftly past him.

  “If it only could have stayed,” she said, “the way it was at first. Then we were glad of our existence and our emotions were so shallow and we seemed to be so happy. Like little happy children, running in the sun. But then we all grew up. And I think I the most of all.”

  She smiled at him and tears were in her eyes.

  “Don’t take it so hard, Enoch. We can …”

  “My dear,” he said, “I’ve been in love with you since the first day that I saw you. I think maybe even before that.”

  He reached out a hand to her, then pulled it back, remembering.

  “I did not know,” she said. “I should not have told you. You could live with it until you knew I loved you, too.”

  He nodded dumbly.

  She bowed her head. “Dear God, we don’t deserve this. We have done nothing to deserve it.”

  She raised her head and looked at him. “If I could only touch you.”

  “We can go on,” he said, “as we have always done. You can come to see me any time you want. We can …”

  She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work,” she said. “There could neither of us stand it.”

  He knew that she was right. He knew that it was done. For fifty years she and the others had been dropping in to visit. And they’d come no more. For the fairyland was shattered and the magic spell was broken. He’d be left alone—more alone than ever, more alone than before he’d ever known her.

  She would not come again and he could never bring himself to call her up again, even if he could, and his shadow world and his shadow love, the only love he’d ever really had, would be gone forever.

&nbs
p; “Good bye, my dear,” he said.

  But it was too late. She was already gone.

  And from far off, it seemed, he heard the moaning whistle that said a message had come in.

  13

  She had said that they must face up to the kind of things they were.

  And what were they? Not, what did he think they were, but what were they, actually? What did they think themselves to be? For perhaps they knew much better than did he.

  Where had Mary gone? When she left this room, into what kind of limbo did she disappear? Did she still exist? And if so, what kind of an existence would it be? Would she be stored away somewhere as a little girl would store away her doll in a box pushed back into the closet with all the other dolls?

  He tried to imagine limbo and it was a nothingness, and if that were true, a being pushed into limbo would be an existence within a non-existence. There would be nothing—not space nor time, nor light, nor air, no color, and no vision, just a never ending nothing that of necessity must lie at some point outside the universe.

  Mary! he cried inside himself. Mary, what have I done to you?

  And the answer lay there, hard and naked.

  He had dabbled in a thing which he had not understood. And had, furthermore, committed that greater sin of thinking that he did understand. And the fact of the matter was that he had just barely understood enough to make the concept work, but had not understood enough to be aware of its consequences.

  With creation went responsibility and he was not equipped to assume more than the moral responsibility for the wrong that he had done, and moral responsibility, unless it might be coupled with the ability to bring about some mitigation, was an entirely useless thing.

  They hated him and resented him and he did not blame them, for he’d led them out and shown them the promised land of humanity and then had led them back. He had given them everything that a human being had with the one exception of that most important thing of all—the ability to exist within the human world.

  They all hated him but Mary, and for Mary it was worse than hate. For she was condemned, by the very virtue of the humanity he had given her, to love the monster who had created her.

  Hate me, Mary, he pleaded. Hate me like the others!

  He had thought of them as shadow people, but that had been just a name he’d thought up for himself, for his own convenience, a handy label that he had tagged them with so that he would have some way of identifying them when he thought of them.

  But the label had been wrong, for they were not shadowy or ghostlike. To the eyes they were solid and substantial, as real as any people. It was only when you tried to touch them that they were not real—for when you tried to touch them, there was nothing there.

  A figment of his mind, he’d thought at first, but now he was not sure. At first they’d come only when he’d called them up, using the knowledge and the techniques that he had acquired in his study of the work done by the thaumaturgists of Alphard XXII. But in recent years he had not called them up. There had been no occasion to. They had anticipated him and come before he could call them up. They sensed his need of them before he knew the need himself. And they were there, waiting for him, to spend an hour or evening.

  Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them, perhaps at the time unconsciously, not knowing why he shaped them so, but in recent years he’d known, although he had tried not to know, would have been the better satisfied if he had not known. For it was a knowledge that he had not admitted, but kept pushed back, far within his mind. But now, when all was gone, when it no longer mattered, he finally did admit it.

  David Ransome was himself, as he had dreamed himself to be, as he had wished himself to be—but, of course, as he had never been. He was the dashing Union officer, of not so high a rank as to be stiff and stodgy, but a fair cut above the man of ordinary standing. He was trim and debonair and definitely dare-devilish, loved by all the women, admired by all the men. He was a born leader and a good fellow all at once, at home alike in the field or drawing room.

  And Mary? Funny, he thought, he had never called her anything but Mary. There had never been a surname. She had been simply Mary.

  And she was at least two women, if not more than that. She was Sally Brown, who had lived just down the road—and how long had it been, he wondered, since he’d thought of Sally Brown? It was strange, he knew, that he had not thought of her, that he now was shocked by the memory of a one-time neighbor girl named Sally Brown. For the two of them once had been in love, or only thought, perhaps, that they had been in love. For even in the later years, when he still remembered her, he had never been quite certain, even through the romantic mists of time, if it had been love or no more than the romanticism of a soldier marching off to war. It had been a shy and fumbling, an awkward sort of love, the love of the farmer’s daughter for the next-door farmer’s son. They had decided to be married when he came home from war, but a few days after Gettysburg he had received the letter, then more than three weeks written, which told him that Sally Brown was dead of diphtheria. He had grieved, he now recalled, but he could not recall how deeply, although it probably had been deeply, for to grieve long and deeply was the fashion in those days.

  So Mary very definitely was partly Sally Brown, but not entirely Sally. She was as well that tall, stately daughter of the South, the woman he had seen for a few moments only as he marched a dusty road in the hot Virginia sun. There had been a mansion, one of those great plantation houses, set back from the road, and she had been standing on the portico, beside one of the great white pillars, watching the enemy march past. Her hair was black and her complexion whiter than the pillar and she had stood so straight and proud, so defiant and imperious, that he had remembered her and thought of her and dreamed of her—although he never knew her name—through all the dusty, sweaty, bloody days of war. Wondering as he thought and dreamed of her if the thinking and the dreaming might be unfaithful to his Sally. Sitting around the campfire, when the talk grew quiet, and again, rolled in his blankets, staring at the stars, he had built up a fantasy of how, when the war was ended, he’d go back to that Virginia house and find her. She might be there no longer, but he still would roam the South and find her. But he never did; he had never really meant to find her. It had been a campfire dream.

  So Mary had been both of these—she had been Sally Brown and the unknown Virginia belle standing by the pillar to watch the troops march by. She had been the shadow of them and perhaps of many others as yet unrealized by him, a composite of all he had ever known or seen or admired in women. She had been an ideal and perfection. She had been his perfect woman, created in his mind. And now, like Sally Brown, resting in her grave; like the Virginia belle, lost in the mists of time; like all the others who may have contributed to his molding of her, she was gone from him.

  And he had loved her, certainly, for she had been a compounding of his loves—a cross section, as it were, of all the women he had ever loved (if he actually had loved any) or the ones he had thought he loved, even in the abstract.

  But that she should love him was something that had never crossed his mind. And until he knew her love for him, it had been quite possible to nurse his love of her close inside the heart, knowing that it was a hopeless love and impossible, but the best that he could manage.

  He wondered where she might be now, where she had retreated—into the limbo he had attempted to imagine or into some strange non-existence, waiting all unknowing for the time she’d come to him again.

  He put up his hands and lowered his head in them and sat in utter misery and guilt, with his face cupped in his fingers.

  She would never come again. He prayed she’d never come. It would be better for the both of them if she never came.

  If he only could be sure, he thought, of where she might be now. If he only could be certain that she was in a semblance of death and untortured
by her thoughts. To believe that she was sentient was more than one could bear.

  He heard the hooting of the whistle that said a message waited and he took his head out of his hands. But he did not get up off the sofa.

  Numbly his hand reached out to the coffee table that stood before the sofa, its top covered with some of the more colorful of the gewgaws and gimcracks that had been left as gifts by travelers.

  He picked up a cube of something that might have been some strange sort of glass or of translucent stone—he had never been able to decide which it was, if either—and cupped it in his hands. Staring into it, he saw a tiny picture, three-dimensional and detailed, of a faery world. It was a prettily grotesque place set inside what might have been a forest glade surrounded by what appeared to be flowering toadstools, and drifting down through the air, as if it might have been a part of the air itself, came what looked for all the world like a shower of jeweled snow, sparkling and glinting in the violet light of a great blue sun. There were things dancing in the glade and they looked more like flowers than animals, but they moved with a grace and poetry that fired one’s blood to watch. Then the faery place was wiped out and there was another place—a wild and dismal place, with grim, gaunt, beetling cliffs rearing high against a red and angry sky, while great flying things that looked like flapping dishrags beat their way up and down the cliffs, and there were others of them roosting, most obscenely, upon the scraggly projections that must have been some sort of misshapen trees growing from the very wall of rock. And from far below, from some distance that one could only guess, came the lonesome thundering of a rushing river.

  He put the cube back upon the table. He wondered what it was that one saw within its depths. It was like turning the pages of a book, with each page a picture of a different place, but never anything to tell where that place might be. When he first had been given it, he had spent fascinated hours, watching the pictures change as he held it in his hands. There had never been a picture that looked even faintly like any other picture and there was no end to them. One got the feeling that these were not pictures, actually, but that one was looking at the scene itself and that at any moment one might lose his perch upon wherever he was roosting and plunge head first down into the place itself.