Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

FLANDERS was waiting in the dining room when Vickers came down the stairs.

"The others left," said Flanders. "They had work to do. And you and I have plotting."

Vickers did not answer. He pulled out a chair and sat down across from Flanders. The sunlight from the windows came down across Flanders' shoulders and his head stood out against the window glass in bold relief, with the whiteness of his hair like a fuzzy halo. His clothes, Vickers saw, still were slightly shabby and his necktie has seen better days, but he still was neat and his face shone with the scrubbing he had given it.

"I see that Hezekiah found some clothes for you," said Flanders. "I don't know what we'd do without Hezekiah. He takes care of us."

"Money, too," said Vickers. "A pack of it was lying on the dresser with the shirt and tie. I didn't take the time to count it, but there'd seem to be several thousand dollars."

"Of course. Hezekiah thinks of everything."

"But I don't want several thousand dollars."

"Go ahead," said Flanders. "We've got bales of it."

"Bales of it!"

"Certainly. We keep making it."

"You mean you counterfeit it?"

"Oh, bless me, no," said Flanders. "Although it's something we have often thought of. Another string to our bow, you might say."

"You mean flood the normal world with counterfeit money?"

"It wouldn't be counterfeit. We could duplicate the money exactly. Turn loose a hundred billion dollars of new money in the world and there'd be hell to pay."

"I can see the point," said Vickers. "I'm amazed you didn't do it."

Flanders looked sharply at him. "I have a feeling that you disapprove of us."

"In some ways I do," said Vickers.

Hezekiah brought in a tray with tall glasses of cold orange juice, plates of scrambled eggs and bacon, buttered toast, a jar of jam and a pot of coffee.

"Good morning, sir," he said to Vickers.

"Good morning, Hezekiah."

"Have you noticed," asked the robot, "how fine the morning is?"

"I have noticed that," said Vickers.

"The weather here is most unusually fine," said Hezekiah. "Much finer, I am told, than on the Earth ahead."

He served the food and left, out through the swinging door the kitchen, where they could hear him moving about at his morning chores.

"We have been humane," said Flanders, "as humane as possible. But we had a job to do and once in a while someone got his toes stepped on. It may be that we will have to get a little rougher now, for we are being pushed. If Crawford and his gang had just taken it a little easier, it would have worked out all right and we wouldn't have had to hurt them or anyone. Ten years more and it would have been easier. Twenty years more and it would have been a cinch. But now it's neither sure nor easy. Now it has to amount almost to revolution. Had we been given twenty years, it would have been evolution.

"Given time and we would have taken over not only world industry and world finance, but world government as well, but they didn't give us the time. The crisis came too soon."

"What we need now," said Vickers, "is a countercrisis."

Flanders seemed not to have heard him. "We set up dummy companies," he continued. "We should have set up more, but we lacked the manpower to operate even the ones we did set up. Given the manpower, we would have set up a vast number of our companies, would have gone more extensively into the manufacture of certain basic gadgets. But we needed the little manpower we had at so many other places — at certain crisis points or to hunt down other mutants to enlist into our group."

"There must be many mutants," Vickers said.

"There are a number of them," agreed Flanders, "but a large percentage of them are so entangled in the world and the affairs of the normal world that you can't dislodge them. Take a mutant man married to a normal woman. You simply can't, in the name of humanity, break up a happy marriage. Say some of their children are mutants — what can you do about them? You can't do a thing about it. You simply watch and wait. When they grow up and go out on their own, you can approach them, but not before that time.

"Take a banker or an industrialist upon whose shoulders rest an economic empire. Tell him he's a mutant and he'll laugh at you. He's made his place in life; he's satisfied; whatever idealism or liberalism he may have had at one time has disappeared beneath the exterior of rugged individualism. His loyalties are set to the pattern of the life he's made and there's nothing we can offer that will interest him."

"You might try immortality," suggested Vickers.

"We haven't got immortality."

"You should have attacked on the governmental level."

Flanders shook his head. "We couldn't. We did a little of it, but not much. With a thousand major posts in the governments of the world, we would have turned the trick quickly and easily. But we didn't have the thousand mutants to train for government and diplomatic jobs.

"By various methods, we did head off crisis after crisis. The carbohydrates relieved a situation which would have led to war. Helping the West get the hydrogen bomb years ahead of time held off the East just when they were set to strike. But we weren't strong enough and we didn't have the time to carry out any well defined, long-range program, so we had to improvise. We introduced gadgets as the only quick way we knew to weaken the socio-economic system of the Earth and, of course, that meant that sooner or later we would force Earth's industry to band against us."

"What else would you expect?" asked Vickers. "You interfere…"

"I suppose we do," said Flanders. "Let's say, Vickers, that you were a surgeon and you had a patient suffering from cancer. To try to make the patient well, you would not hesitate to operate. You would be most zealous in your interference with the patient's body."

"I presume I would," said Vickers.

"The human race," said Flanders, "is our patient. It has a malignant growth. We are the surgeons. It will be painful for the patient and there will be a period of convalescence, but at least the patient will live and I have the gravest doubts that the human race could survive another war."

"But the high-handed methods that you use!"

"Now wait a moment," Flanders objected. "You think there must be other methods and I will agree, but all of them would be equally objectionable to humanity and the old human methods themselves have been discredited long ago. Men have shouted peace and preached the brotherhood of man and there has been no peace and only lip service to brotherhood. You would have us hold conferences? I ask you, my friend, what is the history of the conference?

"Or maybe we should go before the people, before the heads of government, and say to them we are the new mutations of the race and that our knowledge and our ability are greater than theirs and that they should turn all things over to us so we could bring the world to peace. What would happen then? I can tell you what would happen. They'd hate us and drive us out. So there is no choice for us. We must work underground. We must attack the key points. No other way will work."

"What you say," said Vickers, "may be true so far as 'the people' are concerned, but how about the _person_, the individual? How about the little fellow who gets socked in the teeth?"

"Asa Andrews was here this morning," Flanders told him. "He said you'd been at his place and had disappeared and he was worried about what might have happened to you. But that is beside the point. What I want to ask you is, would you say that Asa Andrews was a happy man?"

"I've never seen anybody happier."

"And yet," said Flanders, "we interfered with him. We took away his job — the job he had to have to feed his family and clothe them and keep a roof above their heads. He searched for jobs and could find none. When he finally came for help, we knew that we were the ones who cost him his job, who forced him finally to be evicted, to stand in the street and not know where his family would lay their heads that night. We did all this and yet, in the end, he is a happy man. There are thousands of others throughout this earth who have thus been interfered with and now are happy people. Happy, I must contend, because of our interference."

"You can't claim," Vickers contended, "that there is no price for this happiness. I don't mean the loss of job, time bread of charity — but what comes afterwards. You are settling them here on this earth in what you are pleased to call a pastoral-feudal stage, but the fancy name you call it can't take away the fact that in being settled here they have lost many of the material advantages of human civilization."

"We have taken from them," Flanders said, "little more than the knife with which they'll cut their own or their neighbor's throat. Whatever else we've taken from them will in time be given back, in full measure and with fantastic interest. For it is our hope, Mr. Vickers, that in time to come they all will be like us, that in time the entire race may have everything we have.

"We are not freaks, you understand, but human beings, the next step in evolution. We're just a day or two ahead, a step or two ahead of all the rest of them. To survive, Man had to change, had to mutate, had to become something more than what he was. We are only the first forerunners of that mutation of survival. And because we are the first, we must fight a delaying action. We must fight for the time that it will take for the rest of them to catch up with us. In us you see not one little group of privileged persons, but all of humanity."

"Humanity," said Vickers, sourly, "seems to be taking a dim view of your delaying fight to save them. Up on that world of ours they're smashing gadget shops and hunting down the mutants and hanging them from lamp posts."

"That's where you come in," Flanders pointed out. Vickers nodded. "You want me to stop Crawford."

"You told me you could."

"I had a hunch," said Vickers.

"Your hunches, my friend, are more likely to be right than seasoned reasoning."

"I will need some help," said Vickers.

"Anything you say."

"I want some of your pioneers — men like Asa Andrews, sent back to do some missionary work."

"But we can't do that," protested Flanders.

"They're in this fight, too," said Vickers. "They can't expect to sit and not lift a finger."

"Missionary work? You want them to go back to tell about these other worlds?"

"That is exactly what I want."

"But no one would believe them. With the feeling running as it is on earth they would be mobbed and lynched."

Vickers shook his head. "There is one group that would believe them — the Pretentionists. Don't you see, the Pretentionists are fleeing from reality. They pretend to go back and live in the London of Pepys' day, and to many other eras of the past, but even there they find certain restraining influences, certain encroachments upon their own free will and their security. But here there is complete freedom and security. Here they could go back to the simplicity, the uncomplicated living that they are yearning for. No matter how fantastic it might sound, the Pretentionists would embrace it."

"You're sure of this?" asked Flanders. "Positive."

"But that's not all. There is something else?"

"There is one thing more," said Vickers. "If there were a sudden demand on the carbohydrates, could you meet it?"

"I think we could. We could reconvert our factories. The gadget business is shot now and so is the carbohydrates business. To dispense carbohydrates we'd have to set up a sort of black market system. If we went out in the open, Crawford and his crew would break it up."

"At first, perhaps," agreed Vickers. "But not for very long. Not when tens of thousands of people would be ready to fight him to get their carbohydrates."

"When the carbohydrates are needed," Flanders said, "they'll be there."

"The Pretentionists will believe," said Vickers. "They are ripe for belief, for any kind of fantastic belief. To them it will be an imaginative crusade. Against a normal population, we might have no chance, but we have a great segment of escapists who have been driven to escape by the sickness of the world. All they need is a spark, a word — some sort of promise that there is a chance of real escape as against the mental escape they have been driven to. There will be many who will want to come to this second world. How fast can you bring them through?"

"As fast as they come," said Flanders.

"I can count on that?"

"You can count on that." Flanders shook his head. "I don't know what you're planning. I hope your hunch is right."

"You said it was," Vickers declared.

"You know what you're going up against? You know what Crawford's planning?"

"I think he's planning war, He said it was a secret weapon, but I'm convinced it's war."

"But war…"

"Let's look at war," said Vickers, "just a little differently than it ever has been looked at, just a little differently than the historians see it. Let's see it as a business. Because war, in certain aspects, is just that. When a country goes to war, it means that labor and industry and resources are mobilized and controlled by governments. The businessman plays as important a part as does the military man. The banker and the industrialist is as much in the saddle as the general.

"Now let's go one step further and imagine a war fought on strictly business lines — for the strictly business purpose of obtaining and retaining control in those very areas where we are threatening. War would mean that the system of supply and demand would be suspended and that certain civilian items would cease to be manufactured and that the governments could crack down on anyone who would attempt to sell them…"

"Like cars, perhaps," said Flanders, "and lighters and even razor blades."

"Exactly," Vickers told him. "That way they could gain the time, for they need time as badly as we do. On military pretext, they'd seize complete control of the world economy."

"What you're saying," Flanders said, "is that they plan to start war by agreement."

"I'm convinced that's it," said Vickers. "They'd hold it to a minimum. Perhaps one bomb on New York in return for a bomb on Moscow and another on Chicago for one on Leningrad. You get the idea — a restricted war, a gentleman's agreement. Just enough fighting to convince everyone that it was real.

"But phoney as it might be, a lot of people would die and there'd always be the danger that someone would get sore — and instead of one bomb on Moscow it might be two, or the other way around, or an admiral might get just a bit too enthusiastic and a bit too accurate and sink a ship that wasn't in the deal or a general might —»

"It's fantastic," Flanders said.

"You forget that they are very desperate men. You forget that they are fighting, every one of them, Russian and American, French and Pole and Czech, for the kind of life that Man has built upon the Earth. To them we must appear to be the most vicious enemy mankind's ever faced. To them we are the ogre and the goblin out of the nursery tale. They are frightened stiff."

"And you?" asked Flanders.

"I'd go back to the old Earth, except I lost the top. I don't know where I lost it, but…"

"You don't need the top. That was just for novices. All you have to do is will yourself into the other world. Once you've done it, it's a cinch."

"If I need to get in touch with you?"

"Eb's your man," said Flanders. "Just get hold of Eb."

"You'll send Asa and the others back?"

"We will."

Vickers rose and held out his hand.

"But," said Flanders, "you don't need to leave just yet. Sit down and have another cup of coffee."

Vickers shook his head. "I'm anxious to get going."

"The robots could get you lined up with New York in no time at all," suggested Flanders. "You could return to the old Earth from there."

He knew that a Vickers family, a poor farm family, had lived not more than a mile from where he stood. He thought of them — the woman, courageous in her ragged dress and drab sweater; the man with the pitiful little shelf of books beside his bed and how he used to sit in faded overalls and too-big shirt, reading the books in the dim yellowness of the kerosene lamp; the boy, a helter-skelter sort of kid who had too much imagination and once went to fairyland.

Masquerade, he thought — a bitter masquerade, a listening post set out to spy out the talk of enemies. But it had been their job and they had done it well and they had watched their son grow into a youth and knew by the manner of his growing that he was no throw-back, but truly one of them.

And now they waited, those two who had posed as lonely farmer folk for all the anxious years, fitting themselves into an ordinary niche which was never meant for such as they, against the day when they could take their rightful place in the society which they had given up to stand outpost duty for the big brick house standing proudly on its hill.

He could not turn his back on them and now there was no need to turn his back on them — for there was nothing else.

He walked across the dining room and along the hall that led to the closed front door and he left behind him a trail of footprints in the dust.

Outside the door, he knew, was nothing — not Ann, nor Kathleen, nor any place for him — nothing but the cold knife-edge of duty to a life he had not chosen.

He had his moments of doubt while he drove across the country, savoring the goodness of the things he saw and heard and smelled — the little villages sleeping in the depth of summer with their bicycles and canted coaster wagons, with their shade trees along neat avenues of homes; the first reddening of the early summer apples on the orchard trees; the friendly bumbling of the great transport trucks as they howled along the highways; the way the girl behind the counter smiled at you when you stopped at a roadside eating place for a cup of coffee.

There was nothing wrong, he told himself, nothing wrong with the little villages or the trucks or the girl who smiled. Man's world was a pleasant and a fruitful place, a good place in which to live.

It was then that the mutants and their plans seemed like a nightmare snatched from some lurid Sunday supplement and he wondered, as he drove along, why he didn't simply pull off the road and let the car sit there while he walked off into this good life he saw on every hand. Surely there was within it some place for a man like him: somewhere in the flat corn lands, where the little villages clung to every crossroad, that a man could find peace and security.

But he saw, reluctantly, that he did not seek these things for themselves alone. He sought a place to hide from the thing one could sense in the very air. In wanting to leave his car beside the road and walk away, he knew, he was responding to the same bone-deep fear as the Pretentionists when they escaped emotionally to some other time and place. It was the urge to flee that made him want to leave the car and find a hiding place in the calmness of these corn lands.

But even here, in the agricultural heart of the continent, there was no real peace and security. There was creature comfort and, at times, some measure of unthinking security — if you never read a paper nor listened to a broadcast and did not talk with people. For, he realized, the signposts of insecurity could be found everywhere under the sunlit exteriors: on every doorstep and in every home and at every drugstore corner.

He read the papers and the news was bad. He listened to the radio and the commentators were talking about a new and deeper crisis than the world had ever faced. He listened to the people talking in the lobbies of the hotels where he stopped to spend the nights or in the eating places where he stopped along the road. They would talk and shake their heads and one could see that they were worried.

They said: "What I can't understand is how things could change so quick. Here, just a week or two ago, it looked like the East and West would band together against this mutant business. At last they had something they could fight together instead of fighting one another, but now they're back at it again and it's worse than ever."

They said: "If you ask me, it's them Commies that stirred up this mutant business. You mark my word, they're at the bottom of it."

They said: "It just don't seem possible. Here we sit tonight a million miles from war with everything calm and peaceful. And tomorrow…"

_And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow._

They said: "If it was up to me, I'd get in touch with them mutants. They got stuff up their sleeve that would blow these Commies plumb to hell."

They said: "Like I said thirty years ago, we never should have demobilized at the end of World War II. We should have hit them then. We could've knocked them off in a month or two."

They said: "The hell of it is that you never know. No one ever tells you anything and when they do, it's wrong."

They said: "I wouldn't horse around with them a single God damn minute. I'd load me up some bombs and I'd let them have it."

He listened to them talk and there was no talk of compromise nor of understanding. There was no hope in all the talk that war could be averted. "If not this time," they said, "it'll come in five years, or ten, so let's get it over with. You got to hit them first. In a war like this there ain't no second chance. It's either them or us…"

And it was then that he fully understood that even here, in the heartland of the nation, in the farms and little villages, in the roadside eating places there was a boiling hate. That, he told himself, was the measure of the culture that had been built upon the earth — a culture founded on a hatred and a terrible pride and a suspicion of everyone who did not talk the same language or eat the same food or dress the same as you did.

It was a lop-sided mechanical culture of clanking machines, a technological world that could provide creature comfort, but not human justice nor security. It was a culture that had worked in metals, that had delved into the atom, that had mastered chemicals and had built a complicated and dangerous gadgetry. It had concentrated upon the technological and had ignored the sociological so that a man might punch a button and destroy a distant city without knowing, or even caring, about the lives and habits, the thoughts and hopes and beliefs of the people that he killed.

Underneath the sleek surface one could hear the warning rumble of machines; and the gears and sprockets, the driving chain, the generator, without the leavening of human understanding, were the guideposts to disaster.

He drove and ate and drove again. He ate and slept and drove. He watched the cornfields and the reddening apples in the orchard and heard the song of mowers and smelled the scent of clover and he looked into the sky and felt the terrible fear that hung high in the sky and he knew that Flanders had been right, that to survive Man must mutate and that the survival mutation must win before the storm of hate could break.

But it was not only news of approaching war which filled the columns of the daily press and the frenzied quarter-hours of the news commentators.

There was still the mutant menace and the hatred of the mutants and the continuing exhortations to the people to keep a watch for mutants. There were riots and lynchings and gadget shops burned.

And something else:

A creeping whisper that spread across the land, that was talked over at the drugstore corners and at the dusty cross-roads and in the shadowed night spots of the bigger cities — the whisper that there was another world, a brand new world where one could start his life again, where one would escape from the thousands of years of accumulated mistakes of the present world.

The press at first was wary of the story, then printed cautious stories with very restrained headlines and the news commentators seemed at first to be just as wary, but finally took the plunge. In a very few days the news of the other world and of the strange, starry-eyed people who had talked to someone else (always someone else) who claimed they had come from there ranked with the news of approaching war and with hatred of the mutants.

You could feel the world on edge, as tense as the sudden, strident ringing of a telephone in the dead of night.