New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) (25 page)

He crouched with the leaf clutched tightly in his hand and for a moment there was a silence that held him motionless. Then he heard the frost-loosened leaves pattering all around him, pattering as they fell, talking in little whispers as they sailed down through the air and found themselves a bed with their golden fellows.

In that moment he knew that he was one with the leaves and the whispers that they made, one with the gold and the autumn sunshine and the far blue mist upon the hill above the apple orchard.

A foot crunched stone behind him and his eyes came open and the golden leaves were gone.

“I am sorry if I disturbed you, Ancestor,” said the man. “I had an appointment for this hour, but I would not have disturbed you if I had known.”

Young stared at him reproachfully without answering.

“I am kin,” the man told him.

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said Andrew Young. “The Galaxy is cluttered up with descendants of mine.”

The man was very humble. “Of course, you must resent us sometimes. But we are proud of you, sir. I might almost say that we revere you. No other family—”

“I know,” interrupted Andrew Young. “No other family has any fossil quite so old as I am.”

“Nor as wise,” said the man.

Andrew Young snorted. “Cut out that nonsense. Let’s hear what you have to say and get it over with.”

The technician was harassed and worried and very frankly puzzled. But he stayed respectful, for one always was respectful to an ancestor, whoever he might be. Today there were mighty few left who had been born into a mortal world.

Not that Andrew Young looked old. He looked like all adults, a fine figure of a person in the early twenties.

The technician shifted uneasily. “But, sir, this … this …”

“Teddy bear,” said Young.

“Yes, of course. An extinct terrestrial subspecies of animal?”

“It’s a toy,” Young told him. “A very ancient toy. All children used to have them five thousand years ago. They took them to bed.”

The technician shuddered. “A deplorable custom. Primitive.”

“Depends on the viewpoint,” said Young. “I’ve slept with them many a time. There’s a world of comfort in one, I can personally assure you.”

The technician saw that it was no use to argue. He might as well fabricate the thing and get it over with.

“I can build you a fine model, sir,” he said, trying to work up some enthusiasm. “I’ll build in a response mechanism so that it can give simple answers to certain keyed questions and, of course, I’ll fix it so it’ll walk, either on two legs or four …”

“No,” said Andrew Young.

The technician looked surprised and hurt. “No?”

“No,” repeated Andrew Young. “I don’t want it fancied up. I want it a simple lump of make-believe. No wonder the children of today have no imagination. Modern toys entertain them with a bag of tricks that leave the young’uns no room for imagination. They couldn’t possibly think up, on their own, all the screwy things these new toys do. Built-in responses and implied consciousness and all such mechanical trivia. …”

“You just want a stuffed fabric,” said the technician, sadly, “with jointed arms and legs.”

“Precisely,” agreed Young.

“You’re sure you want fabric, sir? I could do a neater job in plastics.”

“Fabric,” Young insisted firmly, “and it must be scratchy.”

“Scratchy, sir?”

“Sure. You know. Bristly. So it scratches when you rub your face against it.”

“But no one in his right mind would want to rub his face …”

“I would,” said Andrew Young. “I fully intend to do so.”

“As you wish, sir,” the technician answered, beaten now.

“When you get it done,” said Young, “I have some other things in mind.”

“Other things?” The technician looked wildly about, as if seeking some escape.

“A high chair,” said Young. “And a crib. And a wooly dog. And buttons.”

“Buttons?” asked the technician. “What are buttons?”

“I’ll explain it all to you,” Young told him airily. “It all is very simple.”

It seemed, when Andrew Young came into the room, that Riggs and Stanford had been expecting him, had known that he was coming and had been waiting for him.

He wasted no time on preliminaries or formalities.

They know, he told himself. They know, or they have guessed. They would be watching me. Ever since I brought in my petition, they have been watching me, wondering what I would be thinking, trying to puzzle out what I might do next. They know every move I’ve made, they know about the toys and the furniture and all the other things. And I don’t need to tell them what I plan to do.

“I need some help,” he said, and they nodded soberly, as if they had guessed he needed help.

“I want to build a house,” he explained. “A big house. Much larger than the usual house.”

Riggs said, “We’ll draw the plans for you. Do anything else that you—”

“A house,” Young went on, “About four or five times as big as the ordinary house. Four or five times normal scale, I mean. Doors twenty-five to thirty feet high and everything else in proportion.”

“Neighbors or privacy?” asked Stanford.

“Privacy,” said Young.

“We’ll take care of it,” promised Riggs. “Leave the matter of the house to us.”

Young stood for a long moment, looking at the two of them. Then he said, “I thank you, gentlemen. I thank you for your helpfulness and your understanding. But most of all I thank you for not asking any questions.”

He turned slowly and walked out of the room and they sat in silence for minutes after he was gone.

Finally, Stanford offered a deduction: “It will have to be a place that a boy would like. Woods to run in and a little stream to fish in and a field where he can fly his kites. What else could it be?”

“He’s been out ordering children’s furniture and toys,” Riggs agreed. “Stuff from five thousand years ago. The kind of things he used when he was a child. But scaled to adult size.”

“Now,” said Stanford, “he wants a house built to the same proportions. A house that will make him think or help him believe that he is a child. But will it work, Riggs? His body will not change. He cannot make it change. It will only be in his mind.”

“Illusion,” declared Riggs. “The illusion of bigness in relation to himself. To a child, creeping on the floor, a door is twenty-five to thirty feet high, relatively. Of course the child doesn’t know that. But Andrew Young does. I don’t see how he’ll overcome that.”

“At first,” suggested Stanford, “he will know that it’s illusion, but after a time, isn’t there a possibility that it will become reality so far as he’s concerned? That’s why he needs our help. So that the house will not be firmly planted in his memory as a thing that’s merely out of proportion … so that it will slide from illusion into reality without too great a strain.”

“We must keep our mouths shut.” Riggs nodded soberly. “There must be no interference. It’s a thing he must do himself … entirely by himself. Our help with the house must be the help of an unseen, silent agency. Like brownies, I think the term was that he used, we must help and be never seen. Intrusion by anyone would introduce a jarring note and would destroy illusion and that is all he has to work on. Illusion pure and simple.”

“Others have tried,” objected Stanford, pessimistic again. “Many others. With gadgets and machines …”

“None has tried it,” said Riggs, “with the power of mind alone. With the sheer determination to wipe out five thousand years of memory.”

“That will be his stumbling block,” said Stanford. “The old, dead memories are the things he has to beat. He has to get rid of them … not just bury them, but get rid of them for good and all, forever.”

“He must do more than that,” said Riggs. “He must replace his memories with the outlook he had when he was a child. His mind must be washed out, refreshed, wiped clean and shining and made new again … ready to live another five thousand years.”

The two men sat and looked at one another and in each other’s eyes they saw a single thought—the day would come when they, too, each of them alone, would face the problem Andrew Young faced.

“We must help,” said Riggs, “in every way we can and we must keep watch and we must be ready … but Andrew Young cannot know that we are helping or that we are watching him. We must anticipate the materials and tools and the aids that he may need.”

Stanford started to speak, then hesitated, as if seeking in his mind for the proper words.

“Yes,” said Riggs. “What is it?”

“Later on,” Stanford managed to say, “much later on, toward the very end, there is a certain factor that we must supply. The one thing that he will need the most and the one thing that he cannot think about, even in advance. All the rest can be stage setting and he can still go on toward the time when it becomes reality. All the rest may be make-believe, but one thing must come as genuine or the entire effort will collapse in failure.”

Riggs nodded. “Of course. That’s something we’ll have to work out carefully.”

“If we can,” Stanford said.

The yellow button over here and the red one over there and the green one doesn’t fit, so I’ll throw it on the floor and just for the fun of it, I’ll put the pink one in my mouth and someone will find me with it and they’ll raise a ruckus because they will be afraid that I will swallow it.

And there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that I love better than a full-blown ruckus. Especially if it is over me.

“Ug,” said Andrew Young, and he swallowed the button.

He sat stiff and straight in the towering high chair and then, in a fury, swept the oversized muffin tin and its freight of buttons crashing to the floor.

For a second he felt like weeping in utter frustration and then a sense of shame crept in on him.

Big baby, he said to himself.

Crazy to be sitting in an overgrown high chair, playing with buttons and mouthing baby talk and trying to force a mind conditioned by five thousand years of life into the channels of an infant’s thoughts.

Carefully he disengaged the tray and slid it out, cautiously shinnied down the twelve-foot-high chair.

The room engulfed him, the ceiling towering far above him.

The neighbors, he told himself, no doubt thought him crazy, although none of them had said so. Come to think of it, he had not seen any of his neighbors for a long spell now.

A suspicion came into his mind. Maybe they knew what he was doing, maybe they were deliberately keeping out of his way in order not to embarrass him.

That, of course, would be what they would do if they had realized what he was about. But he had expected … he had expected … that fellow, what’s his name? … at the commission, what’s the name of that commission, anyhow? Well, anyway, he’d expected a fellow whose name he couldn’t remember from a commission the name of which he could not recall to come snooping around, wondering what he might be up to, offering to help, spoiling the whole setup, everything he’d planned.

I can’t remember, he complained to himself. I can’t remember the name of a man whose name I knew so short a time ago as yesterday. Nor the name of a commission that I knew as well as I know my name. I’m getting forgetful. I’m getting downright childish.

Childish?

Childish!

Childish and forgetful.

Good Lord, thought Andrew Young, that’s just the way I want it.

On hands and knees he scrabbled about and picked up the buttons, put them in his pocket. Then, with the muffin tin underneath his arm, he shinnied up the high chair and, seating himself comfortably, sorted out the buttons in the pan.

The green one over here in this compartment and the yellow one … oops, there she goes onto the floor. And the red one in with the blue one and this one … this one … what’s the color of this one? Color? What’s that?

What is what?

What—

“It’s almost time,” said Stanford, “and we are ready, as ready as we’ll ever be. We’ll move in when the time is right, but we can’t move in too soon. Better to be a little late than a little early. We have all the things we need. Special size diapers and—”

“Good Lord,” exclaimed Riggs, “it won’t go that far, will it?”

“It should,” said Stanford. “It should go even further to work right. He got lost yesterday. One of our men found him and led him home. He didn’t have the slightest idea where he was and he was getting pretty scared and he cried a little. He chattered about birds and flowers and he insisted that our man stay and play with him.”

Riggs chuckled softly. “Did he?”

“Oh, certainly. He came back worn to a frazzle.”

“Food?” asked Riggs. “How is he feeding himself?”

“We see that there’s a supply of stuff, cookies and such-wise, left on a low shelf, where he can get at them. One of the robots cooks up some more substantial stuff on a regular schedule and leaves it where he can find it. We have to be careful. We can’t mess around too much. We can’t intrude on him. I have a feeling he’s almost reached an actual turning point. We can’t afford to upset things now that he’s come this far.”

“The android’s ready?”

“Just about,” said Stanford.

“And the playmates?”

“Ready. They were less of a problem.”

“There’s nothing more that we can do?”

“Nothing,” Stanford said. “Just wait, that’s all. Young has carried himself this far by the sheer force of will alone. That will is gone now. He can’t consciously force himself any further back. He is more child than adult now. He’s built up a regressive momentum and the only question is whether that momentum is sufficient to carry him all the way back to actual babyhood.”

“It has to go back to that?” Riggs looked unhappy, obviously thinking of his own future. “You’re only guessing, aren’t you?”

“All the way or it simply is no good,” Stanford said dogmatically. “He has to get an absolutely fresh start. All the way or nothing.”

“And if he gets stuck halfway between? Half child, half man, what then?”

“That’s something I don’t want to think about,” Stanford said.

He had lost his favorite teddy bear and gone to hunt it in the dusk that was filled with elusive fireflies and the hush of a world quieting down for the time of sleep. The grass was drenched with dew and he felt the cold wetness of it soaking through his shoes as he went from bush to hedge to flowerbed, looking for the missing toy.