Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

THE house was dark, sleeping in the moonlight, with the tall shadows of the trees cast against its front. He stood in the shadow just outside the front gate and looked at it, remembering how he had seen it in the moonlight once before, when a road ran past the gate, but now there was no road. He recalled how the moonlight had fallen on the whiteness of the pillars and had turned them to ghostly beauty and of the words the two of them had said as they stood and watched the moonlight shattered on the pillars.

But that was dead and done, that was gone and buried and all that was left was the bitterness of knowing that he was not a man, but the imitation of a man.

He opened the gate and went up the walk and climbed the steps that led to the porch. He crossed the porch and his footsteps rang so loudly in the stillness of the moonlight that he felt certain those in the house would hear him.

He found the bell and put his thumb upon it and pressed, then stood waiting, as he had waited once before. But this time there would be no Kathleen to come to the door to greet him.

He waited and a light sprang into life in the central hall and through the glass he saw a man-like figure fumbling at the door. The door came open and he stepped inside and the gleaming robot bowed a little stiffly and said, "Good evening, sir."

"Hezekiah, I presume," said Vickers.

"Hezekiah, sir," the robot confirmed. "You met me this morning."

"I went for a walk," said Vickers.

"And now perhaps, I could show you to your room."

The robot turned and went up the winding staircase, with Vickers following him.

"It's a nice night, sir," the robot said.

"Very nice."

"You have eaten, sir?"

"Yes, thank you."

"I could bring you up a snack, if you haven't eaten," Hezekiah offered. "I believe there is some chicken left."

"No," said Vickers. "Thank you just the same."

Hezekiah shoved open a door and turned on a light, then stepped aside for Vickers to go in.

"Perhaps," said Hezekiah, "you would like a nightcap."

"That's a good idea, Hezekiah. Scotch, if you have it handy."

"In just a moment, sir. You will find some pajamas in the third drawer from the top. They may be a little large, but probably you can manage."

He found the pajamas and they were fairly new and very loud and they seemed quite a bit too big, but they were better than nothing

The room was pleasant, with a huge bed covered by a white, stitched counterpane and the white curtains at the windows blew in on the nighttime breeze,

He sat down in a chair to wait for Hezekiah and the drink and for the first time in many days he knew how tired he was. He'd have the drink and climb into bed and when morning came he'd go stomping down the stairs, looking for a showdown.

The door opened.

It wasn't Hezekiah; it was Horton Flanders, in a crimson dressing robe fastened tight about his neck and slippers on his feet that slapped against the floor as he crossed the room.

He crossed the room and sat down in another chair and looked at Vickers, with a half smile on his face.

"So you came back," he said.

"I came back to listen," Vickers told him. "You can start talking right away."

"Why, certainly," said Flanders. "That's why I got up. As soon as Hezekiah told me you had arrived, I knew you'd want to talk."

"I don't want to talk. I want you to talk."

"Oh, yes, certainly. I am the one to talk."

"And not about the reservoirs of knowledge, of which you talk most beautifully. But certain practical, rather mundane things."

"Like what?"

"Like why I am an android and why Ann Carter is an android. And whether there ever was a person named Kathleen Preston or is that just a story that was conditioned in my mind? And if there ever was a person named Kathleen Preston, where is she now? And, finally, where do I fit in and what do you intend to do?"

Flanders nodded his head. "A very admirable set of questions. You _would_ pick the very ones I can't answer to your satisfaction."

Vickers said: "I came to tell you that the mutants are being hunted down and killed on that other world, that the gadget shops are being wrecked and burned, that the normal humans are finally fighting back. I came to warn you because I thought I was a mutant, too…"

"You are a mutant, I can assure you, Vickers, a very special kind of mutant."

"A mutant android."

"You are difficult," said Flanders. "You let your bitterness —»

"Of course I'm bitter," Vickers cut in. "Who wouldn't be? For forty years I think I am a man and now I find I'm not."

"You fool," said Horton Flanders, sadly, "you don't know what you are."

Hezekiah rapped on the door and came in with a tray. He set the tray on a table and Vickers saw that there were two glasses and some mix and an ice bucket and a fifth of liquor.

"Now," said Flanders, more happily, "perhaps we can talk some sense. I don't know what it is about the stuff, but put a drink into a man's hand and you tend to civilize him."

He reached into the pocket of his robe, brought out a pack of cigarettes and passed them to Vickers. Vickers took the pack and saw that his hand was shaking a little as he pulled out a smoke. He hadn't realized until then just how tense he was.

Flanders snapped the lighter and held out the flame. Vickers got his light.

"That's good," he said. "I ran out of smokes after the fourth day."

He sat in the chair, smoking, thinking how good the tobacco tasted, feeling the satisfaction run along his nerves. He watched Hezekiah busy with the drinks.

"I eavesdropped this morning," Vickers said. "I came here this morning and Hezekiah let me in. I eavesdropped when you and some others were talking in the room."

"I know you did," said Flanders.

"How much of that was staged?"

"All of it," said Flanders, blithely. "Every blessed word of it."

"You _wanted_ me to know I was an android."

"We wanted you to know."

"You set the mouse on me?"

"We had to do something to shake you out of your humdrum life," said Flanders. "And the mouse served a special purpose."

"It tattled on me."

"Oh, exceedingly well. The mouse was a most efficient tattler."

"The thing that really burns me," Vickers said, "is that business about making Cliffwood think I had done you in."

"We had to get you out of there and headed back to your childhood haunts."

"How did you know I'd go to my childhood haunts?"

Flanders said: "My friend, have you ever thought about the ability of hunch. I don't mean the feeble hunch that is used on the racetrack to pick a winner or the hunch about whether it is going to rain or not, or whether some other minor happening is going to take place… but the ability in the fullness of its concept. You might say it is the instinctive ability to assess the result of a given number of factors, to know, without actually thinking the matter out, what is about to happen. It's almost like being able to peek into the future."

"Yes," said Vickers, "I have thought about it. A good deal in the last few days, as a matter of fact."

"You have speculated on it?"

"To some extend. But what has…"

"Perhaps," said Flanders, "you have speculated that it might be a human ability that we never developed, that we scarcely knew was there and so never bothered with, or that it might be one of those abilities that it takes a long time to develop, a sort of an ace-in-the-hole ability for mankind's use when he was ready for it or might have need of it?

"I did think that, or at least some of it, but…"

"Now's the time we need it." Flanders interrupted again. "And that answers the question that you asked. We hunched you would go back."

"At first I thought Crawford was the one, but he said he wasn't."

Flanders shook his head. "Crawford wouldn't have done it. He needs you too badly. Crawford wouldn't scare you off. Your hunch on that one wasn't working too hot."

"No, I guess it wasn't."

"Your hunches don't work," said Flanders, "because you don't give them a chance. You still have the world of reason to contend with. You put your reliance on the old machine-like reasoning that the human race has relied on since it left the caves. You figure out every angle and you balance it against every other angle and you add up and cancel out as if you were doing a problem in arithmetic. You never give hunch a chance. That's the trouble with you."

And that _was_ the trouble, Vickers thought. He'd had a hunch to spin the top on the porch of the Preston house and if he had done that he'd saved himself days of walking through the wilderness of this second world. He'd had a hunch that he should have paid attention to Crawford's note and not driven the Forever car and if he'd done that he'd saved himself a lot of trouble. And there had been the hunch, which he had finally obeyed, that he must get back the top — and that one had paid off.

"How much do you know?" asked Flanders.

Vickers shook his head. "I don't really know anything much," he admitted. "I know there's a mutant organization. One that must have started years ago, one that had something to do with kicking the human race out of the rut you talked about that night back in Cliffwood. And the organization has gone underground, back here on the other worlds, because its operations were getting too widespread and too significant to escape attention. You've got factories working, turning out the mutant gadgets you're using to wreck the industry of the old world. I saw one of those. Run by robots. Tell me, do the robots run it or…"

Flanders chuckled. "The robots run it. We just tell them what we want."

"Then there's this business of listening to the stars."

"We've gotten many good ideas that way," said Flanders. "Not all of us can do it. Just some of us, who are natural telepaths. And as I told you that night we talked, not all the ideas are ones that we can use. Sometimes we just get a hint of something and we go on from there."

"And where are you headed? Where do you intend to go?"

"That's one that I can't answer. There are so many new possibilities being added all the time, so many new directions opening out. We're close to many great discoveries. For one thing, immortality. There is one listener…"

"You mean," asked Vickers, "everlasting life?"

"Why not'?"

Of course, thought Vickers, why not? If you had everlasting razor blades and everlasting light bulbs, why not everlasting life? Why not shoot the works?

"And androids?" he asked. "Where would an android like myself fit it? Surely, an android can't be too important."

"We have a job for you," said Flanders. "Crawford is your job."

"What do I do with Crawford?"

"You stop him."

Vickers laughed. "Me? You know what's back of Craw ford?"

"I know what's back of you."

"Tell me," Vickers said.

"Hunch — the highest, most developed hunch ability that ever has been registered in a human being. The highest eve registered and the most unsuspected, the least used of any we have ever known."

"Wait a minute. You're forgetting that I'm not a human being."

"Once you were," said Flanders. "You will be again. Before we took your life…"

"Took my life!"

"The life essence," said Flanders, "the mind, the thoughts and impressions and reactions that made up Jay Vickers — the real Jay Vickers — aged eighteen. Like pouring water from one vessel to another. We poured you from your body into an android body and we've kept and guarded your body against the day we can pour it back again."

Vickers came half out of his chair.

Flanders waved a hand at him. "Sit down. You were going to ask me why."

"And you're going to answer me," said Vickers.

"Certainly I will answer you. When you were eighteen you were not aware of the ability you had. There was no way to make you aware of it. It would have done no good to tell you or to attempt to train you, for you had to grow into it. We figured it would take fifteen years and it took more than twenty and you aren't even yet as aware as you should be."

"But I could have…"

"Yes," said Flanders, "you could have grown aware of it is your own body, except that there is another factor — inherent memory. Your genes carry the inherent memory factor, another mutation that occurs as infrequently as our telepathic listeners. Before Jay Vickers started fathering children we wanted him to be entirely aware of his hunch ability."

Vickers remembered how he had speculated on the possibility of inherent memory, lying on the corn shuck mattress in the loft of Andrews' house. Inherent memory, memory passed on from father to son. His father had known about inherent memory, so he had guessed it, too. He had known about it, or at least he'd remembered it when the time had come for him to know about it, when he was growing — he groped for the word — aware.

"So that is it," said Vickers. "You want me to put the hunch on Crawford and you want to have my children because they will have hunch, too."

Flanders nodded. "I think we understand one another _now_."

"Yes," said Vickers. "I am sure we do. First of all, you want me to stop Crawford. That is quite an order. What if I put a price on it?"

"We have a price," said Flanders. "A most attractive price. I think it will interest you."

"Try me."

"You asked about Kathleen Preston. You asked if there were such a person and I can tell that there is. How old were you when you knew her, by the way?"

"Eighteen."

Flanders nodded idly. "A very fine age to be." He looked at Vickers. "Don't you agree?"

"It seemed so then."

"You were in love with her," said Flanders.

"I was in love with her."

"And she in love with you."

"I think so," Vickers said. "I can't be sure — thinking of it now, I can't be sure, of course. But I think she was."

"You may be assured that she was in love with you."

"You will tell me where she is?"

"No," said Flanders. "I won't."

"But, you…"

"When your job is done, you'll go back to eighteen again."

"And that's the price," said Vickers. "That's the pay I get. To be given back a body that was mine to start with. To be eighteen again."

"It is attractive to you?"

"Yes, I guess so," Vickers said. "But don't you see, Flanders. The dream of eighteen is gone. It has been killed in a forty-year-old android body. It's not just the physical eighteen — it's something else than that. It's the years ahead and the promise of those years and the wild, impractical dreaming of those years and the love that walks beside you in the spring of life."

"Eighteen," said Flanders. "Eighteen and a good chance at immortality and Kathleen Preston, herself seventeen again."

"Kathleen?"

Flanders nodded.

"Just like it was before," said Vickers. "But it won't be the same, Flanders. There is something wrong. Something that has slipped away."

"Just like it was before," insisted Flanders. "As if all these years had never been."