Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER TEN

HE looked under the flower pot on the corner of the stoop to find the key, but it wasn't there and then he remembered that he had left the door unlocked so that Joe could come in and get rid of the mice.

He turned the knob and went in and made his way across the room to turn on the desk lamp. A white square of paper with awkward pencil scrawls upon it lay beneath the lamp.

_Jay: I did the job, then came back and opened up the windows to clean out the smell. I'll give you a hundred bucks a throw for every mouse you find. Joe._

A noise brought him around from the desk and he saw that there was someone on the porch, sitting in his favorite chair, rocking back and forth, a cigarette making a little wavy line dancing in the dark.

"It's I," said Horton Flanders. "Have you had anything to eat?"

"I had something in the village."

"That's a pity. I brought over a tray of sandwiches and some beer. I thought you might be hungry and I know how you hate to cook…"

"Thanks," said Vickers. "I'm not hungry now. We can have them later."

He threw his hat onto a chair and went out onto the porch.

"I have your chair," said Mr. Flanders.

"Keep it," Vickers said. "This one is just as comfortable."

"Did you notice if there was any news today? I have a most deplorable habit, at times, of not looking at the papers."

"The same old thing. Another peace rumor that no one quite believes."

"The cold war still goes on," said Mr. Flanders. "it's been going on for almost thirty years. It warms up now and then, but it never does explode. Has it ever occurred to you, Mr. Vickers, that there have been a dozen times at least when there should have been real war, but somehow or other it has never come to be?"

"I hadn't thought of it."

"But it's the truth. First there was the Berlin airlift trouble and the fighting in Greece. Either one of them could have set off a full scale war, hut each of them was settled. Then there was Korea and that was settled, too. Then Iran threatened to blow up the world, but we got safely past it. Then there were the Manila incidents and the flareup in Alaska and the Indian crisis and half a dozen others. But all of them were settled, one way or another."

"No one really wants to fight," said Vickers.

"Perhaps not," agreed Mr. Flanders, "but it takes more than just the will for peace to prevent a war. Time and again a major nation has climbed out on a limb to a point where they had to fight or back up. They always have backed up. That isn't human nature, Mr. Vickers, or at least it wasn't human nature until thirty years ago. Does it seem to you that something might have happened, some unknown factor, some new equation, that may account for it?"

"I don't quite see how there could be any new factor. The human race is still the human race. They've always fought before. Thirty years ago they had just finished the greatest war that ever had been fought."

"Since then, there has been provocation after provocation and there have been regional wars, but the world has not gone to war. Can you tell me why?"

"No, I can't."

"I have thought about it," said Mr. Flanders, "in an idle way, of course. And it seems to me that there must be some new factor."

"Fear, perhaps," suggested Vickers. "Fear of our frightful weapons."

"That might be it," admitted Mr. Flanders, "but fear is a funny thing. Fear is just as apt to start a war as it is to hold one off. It is quite possible that fear alone might make a people go out and fight to be rid of fear — willing to go against the fear itself to be rid of it. I don't think, Mr. Vickers, that fear alone can account for peace."

"You're thinking of some psychological factor?"

"Perhaps that might be it," said Mr. Flanders. "Or it might be intervention."

"Intervention! Who would intervene?"

"I really couldn't say. But the thought is not a new one to me and not in this respect alone. Starting about eighty years or so ago something happened to the world. Up until that time man had stumbled along pretty much in the same old ruts. There had been some progress here and there, some changes, but not very many of them. Not many changes in thinking especially and that is the thing that counts.

"Then mankind, which had been shambling along, broke into a gallop. The automobile was invented and the telephone and motion pictures and flying machine. There was the radio and all the other gadgetry that characterized the first quarter of the century.

"But that was largely mechanics, pure and simple, putting two and two together and having four come out. In the second quarter of the century classical physics was largely displaced by a new kind of thinking, a thinking which admitted that it didn't know when it came face to face with the atoms and electrons. And out of that came theories and the physics of the atom and all the probabilities that today still are probabilities.

"And that, I think, was the greatest stride of all — that the physicists who had fashioned neat cubicles of knowledge and had classified and assigned all the classical knowledge to fit into them snugly should have had the courage to say they didn't know what made electrons behave the way they do."

"You're trying to say," Vickers put in, "that something happened to whip man out of his rut. But it wasn't the first time a thing like that had happened. Before it there had been the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution."

"I did not say it was the only time it had ever happened," Mr. Flanders told him. "I merely said it happened. The fact that it had happened before, in a slightly different manner, should prove that it is not an accident, but some sort of cycle, some sort of influence which is operative within the human race. What is it that kicks a plodding culture out of a shuffle into a full-fledged gallop and, in this case at least, keeps it galloping for almost a hundred years without a sign of slackening?"

"You said intervention," said Vickers. "You're off on some wild fantasy. Men from Mars, maybe?"

Mr. Flanders shook his head. "Not men from Mars. I don't think it's men from Mars. Let's be a little more general."

He waved his cigarette at the sky above the hedge and trees, with its many stars twinkling in the night. "Out there must be great reservoirs of knowledge. At many points in all that space out beyond our earth there must be thinking beings and they would create knowledge that we had never dreamed of. Some of it might be applicable to humans and to earth and much of it would not."

"You're suggesting that some one from out there —»

"No," said Mr. Flanders. "I'm suggesting that the knowledge is there and waiting, waiting for us to go out there and get it."

"We haven't even reached the moon yet."

"We may not need to wait for rockets. We may not have to go physically to get it. We might reach out with our minds…"

"Telepathy?"

"Perhaps. Maybe that is what you could call it. A mind probing out and searching — a mind reaching out for a mind. If there is such a thing as telepathy, distance should make no difference — a half a mile or a light year, what would be the difference? For the mind is not a physical property, it is not bound, or should not be bound, by the laws that say that nothing can exceed the speed of light."

Vickers laughed uneasily, feeling the slow crawl of invisible, many-footed creatures moving on his neck.

"You can't be serious," he said.

"Perhaps I'm not," admitted Mr. Flanders. "Perhaps I'm an old eccentric who has found a man who will listen to him and will not laugh too much."

"But this knowledge that you talk of. There is no evidence that such knowledge can be applied, that it ever could be used. It would be alien, it would involve alien logic and apply to alien problems and it would be based on alien concepts that we could not understand."

"Much of it would," said Mr. Flanders. "You would have to sift and winnow. There would be much chaff, but you would find some kernels. You might find, for instance, a way in which friction could be eliminated and if you found that you would have machines that would last forever and you would have —»

"Wait a minute," snapped Vickers, tensely, "what are you getting at? What about this business of machines that would run forever? We have that already. I was talking to Eb just this morning and he was telling me —»

"About a car. That, Mr. Vickers, is exactly what I mean."