The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (95 page)

From
Memoirs and Reflections,
by Alan Robertson:

Often I hear myself declared humanity’s preeminent benefactor, though the jocular occasionally raise a claim in favor of the original serpent. After all circumspection
I really cannot dispute the judgment. My place in history is secure; my name will persist as if it were printed indelibly across the sky. All of which I find absurd but understandable. For I have
given wealth beyond calculation. I have expunged deprivation, famine, overpopulation, territorial constriction: All the first-order causes of contention have vanished. My gifts go freely and carry
with them my personal joy, but as a reasonable man (and for lack of other restrictive agency), I feel that I cannot relinquish all control, for when has the human animal ever been celebrated for
abnegation and self-discipline?

We now enter an era of plenty and a time of new concerns. The old evils are gone: we must resolutely prohibit a flamboyant and perhaps unnatural set of new vices
.

The three girls gulped down breakfast, assembled their homework, and departed noisily for school.

Elizabeth poured coffee for herself and Gilbert. He thought she seemed pensive and moody. Presently she said, “It’s so beautiful here . . . We’re very lucky,
Gilbert.”

“I never forget it.”

Elizabeth sipped her coffee and mused a moment, following some vagrant train of thought. She said, “I never liked growing up. I always felt strange – different from the other girls.
I really don’t know why.”

“It’s no mystery. Everyone for a fact is different.”

“Perhaps . . . But Uncle Peter and Aunt Emma always acted as if I were more different than usual. I remember a hundred little signals. And yet I was such an ordinary little girl . . . Do
you remember when you were little?”

“Not very well.” Gilbert Duray looked out the window he himself had glazed, across green slopes and down to the placid water his daughters had named the Silver River. The Sounding
Sea was thirty miles south; behind the house stood the first trees of the Robber Woods.

Duray considered his past. “Bob owned a ranch in Arizona during the 1870s: one of his fads. The Apaches killed my father and mother. Bob took me to the ranch, and then when I was three he
brought me to Alan’s house in San Francisco, and that’s where I was brought up.”

Elizabeth sighed. “Alan must have been wonderful. Uncle Peter was so grim. Aunt Emma never told me anything. Literally, not anything! They never cared the slightest bit for me, one way or
the other . . . I wonder why Bob brought the subject up – about the Indians and your mother and father being scalped and all . . . He’s such a strange man.”

“Was Bob here?”

“He looked in a few minutes yesterday to remind us of his Rumfuddle. I told him I didn’t want to leave the girls. He said to bring them along.”

“Hah!”

“I told him I didn’t want to go to his damn Rumfuddle with or without the girls. In the first place, I don’t want to see Uncle Peter, who’s sure to be there . .
.”

From
Memoirs and Reflections:

I insisted then and I insist now that our dear old Mother Earth, so soiled and toil-worn, never be neglected. Since I pay the piper (in a manner of speaking), I call the
tune, and to my secret amusement I am heeded most briskly the world around, in the manner of bellboys, jumping to the command of an irascible old gentleman who is known to be a good tipper. No one
dares to defy me. My whims become actualities; my plans progress
.

Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Venice, London, Dublin, surely will persist, gradually to become idealized essences of their former selves, as wine in due course becomes the
soul of the grape. What of the old vitality? The shouts and curses, the neighborhood quarrels, the raucous music, the vulgarity? Gone, all gone! (But easy of reference at any of the cognates.) Old
Earth is to be a gentle, kindly world, rich in treasures and artifacts, a world of old places – old inns, old roads, old forests, old palaces – where folk come to wander and dream, to
experience the best of the past without suffering the worst

Material abundance can now be taken for granted: Our resources are infinite. Metal, timber, soil, rock, water, air: free for anyone’s taking. A single commodity remains in finite
supply: human toil
.

Gilbert Duray, the informally adopted grandson of Alan Robertson, worked on the Urban Removal Program. Six hours a day, four days a week, he guided a trashing machine across
deserted Cuperinto, destroying tract houses, service stations, and supermarkets. Knobs and toggles controlled a steel hammer at the end of a hundred-foot boom; with a twitch of the finger, Duray
toppled powerpoles, exploded picture windows, smashed siding and stucco, exploded picture windows, smashed siding and stucco, pulverized concrete. A disposal rig crawled fifty feet behind. The
detritus was clawed upon a conveyor belt, carried to a twenty-foot orifice, and dumped with a rush and a rumble into the Apathetic Ocean. Aluminum siding, asphalt shingles, corrugated fiber-glass,
TVs and barbecues, Swedish Modern furniture, Book-of-the-Month selections, concrete patio-tiles, finally the sidewalk and street itself: all to the bottom of the Apathetic Ocean. Only the trees
remained, a strange eclectic forest stretching as far as the eye could reach: liquidambar and Scotch pine; Chinese pistachio, Atlas cedar, and ginkgo; white birch and Norway maple.

At one o’clock Howard Wirtz emerged from the caboose, as they called the small locker room at the rear of the machine. Wirtz had homesteaded a Miocene world; Duray, with a wife and three
children, had preferred the milder environment of a contemporary semicognate: the popular Type A world on which man had never evolved.

Duray gave Wirtz the work schedule. “More or less like yesterday – straight out Persimmon to Walden, then right a block and back.”

Wirtz, a dour and laconic man, acknowledged the information with a jerk of the head. On his Miocene world he lived alone, in a houseboat on a mountain lake. He harvested wild rice, mushrooms,
and berries; he shot geese, ground-fowl, deer, young bison, and had once informed Duray that after his five-year work-time he might just retire to his lake and never appear on Earth again, except
maybe to buy clothes and ammunition. “Nothing here I want, nothing at all.”

Duray had given a derisive snort. “And what will you do with all your time?”

“Hunt, fish, eat, and sleep, maybe sit on the front deck.”

“Nothing else?”

“I just might learn to fiddle. Nearest neighbor is fifteen million years away.”

“You can’t be too careful, I suppose.”

Duray descended to the ground and looked over his day’s work: a quarter-mile swath of desolation. Duray, who allowed his subconscious few extravagances, nevertheless felt a twinge for the
old times, which, for all their disadvantages, at least had been lively. Voices, bicycle bells, the barking of dogs, the slamming of doors, still echoed along Persimmon Avenue. The former
inhabitants presumably preferred their new homes. The self-sufficient had taken private worlds; the more gregarious lived in communities on worlds of every description: as early as the
Carboniferous, as current as the Type A. A few had even returned to the now-uncrowded cities. An exciting era to live in: a time of flux. Duray, thirty-four years old, remembered no other way of
life; the old existence, as exemplified by Persimmon Avenue, seemed antique, cramped, constricted.

He had a word with the operator of the trashing machine; returning to the caboose, Duray paused to look through the orifice across the Apathetic Ocean. A squall hung black above the southern
horizon, toward which a trail of broken lumber drifted, ultimately to wash up on some unknown pre-Cambrian shore. There never would be an inspector sailing forth to protest; the world knew no life
other than mollusks and algae, and all the trash of Earth would never fill its submarine gorges. Duray tossed a rock through the gap and watched the alien water splash up and subside. Then he
turned away and entered the caboose.

Along the back wall were four doors. The second from the left was marked “
G. DURAY
.” He unlocked the door, pulled it open, and stopped short, staring in
astonishment at the blank back wall. He lifted the transparent plastic flap that functioned as an air-seal and brought out the collapsed metal ring that had been the flange surrounding his passway.
The inner surface was bare metal; looking through, he saw only the interior of the caboose.

A long minute passed. Duray stood staring at the useless ribbon as if hypnotized, trying to grasp the implications of the situation. To his knowledge no passway had ever failed, unless it had
been purposefully closed. Who would play him such a spiteful trick? Certainly not Elizabeth. She detested practical jokes and if anything, like Duray himself, was perhaps a trifle too intense and
literal-minded. He jumped down from the caboose and strode off across Cupertino Forest: a sturdy, heavy-shouldered man of about average stature. His features were rough and uncompromising; his
brown hair was cut crisply short; his eyes glowed golden-brown and exerted an arresting force. Straight, heavy eyebrows crossed his long, thin nose like the bar of a T; his mouth, compressed
against some strong inner urgency, formed a lower horizontal bar. All in all, not a man to be trifled with, or so it would seem.

He trudged through the haunted grove, preoccupied by the strange and inconvenient event that had befallen him. What had happened to the passway? Unless Elizabeth had invited friends out to Home,
as they called their world, she was alone, with the three girls at school . . . Duray came out upon Stevens Creek Road. A farmer’s pickup truck halted at his signal and took him into San Jose,
now little more than a country town.

At the transit center he dropped a coin in the turnstile and entered the lobby. Four portals designated “
LOCAL
,” “
CALIFORNIA
,” “
NORTH AMERICA
,” and “
WORLD
” opened in the walls, each portal leading to a hub on
Utilis.
⁴

Duray passed into the “California” hub, found the “Oakland” portal, returned to the Oakland Transit Center on Earth, passed back through the “Local” portal to
the “Oakland” hub on Utilis, and returned to Earth through the “Montclair West” portal to a depot only a quarter mile from Thornhill School,
⁵
to which Duray walked.

In the office Duray identified himself to the clerk and requested the presence of his daughter Dolly.

The clerk sent forth a messenger who, after an interval, returned alone. “Dolly Duray isn’t at school.”

Duray was surprised; Dolly had been in good health and had set off to school as usual. He said, “Either Joan or Ellen will do as well.”

The messenger again went forth and again returned. “Neither one is in their classrooms, Mr. Duray. All three of your children are absent.”

“I can’t understand it,” said Duray, now fretful. “All three set off to school this morning.”

“Let me ask Miss Haig. I’ve just come on duty.” The clerk spoke into a telephone, listened, then turned back to Duray. “The girls went home at ten o’clock. Mrs.
Duray called for them and took them back through the passway.”

“Did she give any reason whatever?”

“Miss Haig says no; Mrs. Duray just told her she needed the girls at home.”

Duray stifled a sigh of baffled irritation. “Could you take me to their locker? I’ll use their passway to get home.”

“That’s contrary to school regulations, Mr. Duray. You’ll understand, I’m sure.”

“I can identify myself quite definitely,” said Duray. “Mr. Carr knows me well. As a matter of fact, my passway collapsed, and I came here to get home.”

“Why don’t you speak to Mr. Carr?”

“I’d like to do so.”

Duray was conducted into the principal’s office, where he explained his predicament. Mr. Carr expressed sympathy and made no difficulty about taking Duray to the children’s
passway.

They went to a hall at the back of the school and found the locker numbered 382. “Here we are,” said Carr. “I’m afraid that you’ll find it a tight fit.” He
unlocked the metal door with his master key and threw it open. Duray looked inside and saw only the black metal at the back of the locker. The passway, like his own, had been closed.

Duray drew back and for a moment could find no words.

Carr spoke in a voice of polite amazement. “How very perplexing! I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like it before! Surely the girls wouldn’t play such a silly
prank!”

“They know better than to touch the passway,” Duray said gruffly. “Are you sure that this is the right locker?”

Carr indicated the card on the outside of the locker, where three names had been typed: “
DOROTHY DURAY, JOAN DURAY, ELLEN DURAY
.” “No mistake,”
said Carr, “and I’m afraid that I can’t help you any further. Are you in common residency?”

“It’s our private homestead.”

Carr nodded with lips judiciously pursed, to suggest that insistence upon so much privacy seemed eccentric. He gave a deprecatory little chuckle. “I suppose if you isolate yourself to such
an extent, you more or less must expect a series of emergencies.”

“To the contrary,” Duray said crisply. “Our life is uneventful, because there’s no one to bother us. We love the wild animals, the quiet, the fresh air. We wouldn’t
have it any differently.”

Carr smiled a dry smile. “Mr. Robertson has certainly altered the lives of us all. I understand that he is your grandfather?”

“I was raised in his household. I’m his nephew’s foster son. The blood relationship isn’t all that close.”

From
Memoirs and Reflections:

I early became interested in magnetic fluxes and their control. After taking my degree, I worked exclusively in this field, studying all varieties of magnetic envelopes and
developing controls over their formation. For many years my horizons were thus limited, and I lived a placid existence
.