New Folks' Home: And Other Stories, Page 3

  But when he looked at the phone directory, it had seemed somewhat less a joke.

  For it was no such directory as any man had ever seen before. It listed names and numbers, but the addresses ranged the galaxy!

  Besur, Yar, Mekbuda V–FE 6-8731

  Beten, Varmo, Polaris III–GR 7-3214

  Beto, Elm, Rasalgethi IX–ST 1-9186

  Star names, he thought, and the planet numbers. They could be nothing else.

  And if it were a joke, it was pointless and expensive.

  Star names listed in the pages of the directory and those other star names upon the books in that special section in the study!

  The obvious conclusion, he told himself, rather plaintively, was too outrageous to be given even slight consideration. It was outrageous and ridiculous and it made no sense and he would not entertain it. There must be other answers and the one he did not like to think about was that he’d gone insane.

  There might be a way, he thought, that it could be settled.

  He flipped the directory closed and then opened the front cover and there it was: TELEPHONE SERVICE CALLS. He lifted the receiver and dialed for INFORMATION.

  There were two ringing sounds and then a voice said:

  “Good evening, Dr. Gray. We are glad you called. We hope everything’s all right. There isn’t any trouble?”

  “You know my name,” said Gray. “How do you know my name?”

  “Sir,” said Information, “it is a point of pride with us that we know the name of each of our subscribers.”

  “But I’m not a subscriber. I’m only—”

  “Oh, but you are,” insisted Information. “As soon as you took possession of the house—”

  “Possession! I did not—”

  “But, Dr. Gray, we thought you knew. We should have told you at the start. We are very sorry. The house, you see, is yours.”

  “No,” Gray said, weakly, “I did not understand.”

  “Yours,” said Information, “so long as you may need it, so long as you may want to keep it. The house and everything that’s in it. Plus all the services, naturally, that you may require.”

  “But it can’t be mine,” said Gray. “I have done nothing that would make it mine. How can I own a house for which I’ve given nothing?”

  “There might be,” said Information, “certain services that, from time to time, you might be willing to perform. Nothing strenuous, of course, and not required, you understand. If you would be willing to perform them, we would be the ones who would stand in debt. But the house is yours no matter what you may elect to do.”

  “Services?” asked Gray. “There are few services, I am afraid, that I could perform.”

  “It does not really matter,” Information told him. “We are very glad you called. Call us again any time you wish.”

  The connection clicked and he was left, standing foolishly with the receiver in his hand.

  He put it back into the cradle and went to the living room, sitting in the chair he’d sat in when he’d found his way into the house the night before.

  While he’d been busy in the hall with the telephone, someone—or something, or some strange procedure—had laid wood in the fireplace and had lit it and the brass wood carrier that stood beside the hearth was filled with other wood against the need of it.

  He watched the fire creeping up the logs, flickering as it climbed, with the cold wind outside growling in the chimney.

  An Old Folks’ Home, he thought.

  For if he’d heard aright, that was what it was.

  And a better one, by far, than the one he had planned to enter.

  There was no reason in the world why anyone should give this house to him. He had done nothing he could think of that entitled him to have it.

  An Old Folks’ Home, all to himself, and on his favorite trout stream.

  It would be wonderful, he thought, if he only could accept it.

  He hitched the chair around so he could face the fire. He had always liked a fire.

  Such a pleasant place, he thought, and such thoughtful service. He wished that he could stay.

  And what was there to stop him? No one would mind if he did not return. In a day or two he could make his way out to Pineview and mail a couple of letters that would fix it so no one would hunt for him.

  But it was madness, he thought. What if he got sick? What if he fell and hurt himself? He could not reach a doctor and there would be no one to help him.

  Then he thought of how he’d hunted for an aspirin and there had been no aspirin. And how he’d crawled into bed with a twisted, swollen ankle that had been all right when he got up in the morning.

  He had no worry, he realized, about ever being sick.

  There had been no aspirin tablet because there had been no need of any.

  This house was not a house alone. It was more than just a house. It was a shelter and a servant and a doctor. It was a safe and antiseptic house and it was compassionate.

  It gave you everything you wanted. It fulfilled your every need. It gave you fire and food and comfort and a sense of being cared for.

  There were the books, he thought. The rows and stacks of books, the very kind of books by which he’d lived for years.

  Dr. Frederick Gray, dean of the school of law. Filled with honor and importance until he got too old, until his wife and son had died and all his friends were gone or incapacitated. Now no longer dean, now no longer scholar, but an old man with a name that was buried in the past.

  He rose slowly from the chair and went into the study. He put out his hand and rubbed the palm of it along the leathery spines of a row of books.

  These were the friends, he told himself, the friends a man could count on. They always were in place and waiting for the time a man might need them.

  He stopped in front of the section that had puzzled him at first, which he had thought of as a farfetched joke. But now he knew there was no joke.

  He read the titles of a few of them: “Basic Statutes of Arcturus XXIV,” “Comparison of the Legal Concepts of the Centaurian Systems,” “Jurisprudence on Zubeneschamali III, VI and VII,” “The Practical Law of Canopus XII.” And many others with the strange names in their titles.

  Perhaps, he thought, he would not have recognized the names so readily had it not been for Ben. For years he had listened to him talk about his work, reeling off many of these very names as if they might be places no farther off than just down the street a ways.

  And maybe, thought Frederick Gray, they were not so far, at that. All he had to do to talk to men—no, not men, perhaps, but beings—in all of these strange places was to walk out into the hall and dial their numbers on the phone.

  A telephone directory, he thought, with numbers for the stars, and on all these shelves law books from the stars.

  Perhaps there were, on those other solar systems, nothing like a telephone or a telephone directory; perhaps, on those other planets there weren’t any law books. But here on Earth, he told himself, the means of communication had to be a telephone, the means of information books upon the shelf. For all of it had to be a matter of translation, twisting the unfamiliar into something that was familiar and that one could use. And translation not for Earth alone, but for all those other beings on all those other planets. On each of a dozen planets there might be a different means of communication, but in the case of a call to him from any of those planets, no matter what means the creature of the planet might employ, the telephone would ring.

  And the names of those other stars would be translations, too. For the creatures who lived upon the planets circling Polaris would not call their sun Polaris. But here on Earth it had to be Polaris, for that was the only way a human had to identify the star.

  The language would have to be translated, too. The creatures he had talked with on the phone coul
d not have spoken English, and yet it had been English when it had reached his ear. And his replies, he knew, must have reached that other party in some language other than the tongue that he had used.

  He stood aghast at the very thought of it, wondering how he could abide such an explanation. And yet there was no choice. It was the only explanation that would fit the situation.

  Somewhere a bell rang sharply and he turned from the shelves of books.

  He waited for it to ring again, but it did not ring.

  He walked into the living room and saw that dinner had been set upon the table and was waiting for him.

  So that was what it had been, he thought. A bell to summon him to dinner.

  After dinner, he went back to the living room to sit before the fire and fight the whole thing out. He assembled the facts and evidence in his old lawyer’s mind and gave full consideration to all possibilities.

  He touched the edge of wonder and shoved it to one side, he erased it carefully—for in his consideration of this house there was no room for wonder and no place for magic.

  Was it no more than illusion? That was the first question one must ask. Was this really happening, or was he just imagining that it was happening? Was he, perhaps, in all reality, sitting underneath a tree or squatting on the river bank, mumbling at nothing, scratching symbols in the dirt with his fingernails, and living the fantasy of this house, this fire, this room?

  It was hard to believe that this might be the case. For there were too many details. Imagination formed a hazy framework and let it go at that.

  There were here too many details and there was no haziness and he could move and think of his own volition; he still was the master of himself.

  And if it were not imagination, if he could rule out insanity, then this house and all that happened must be, indeed, the truth. And if it were the truth, then here was a house built or shaped or somehow put into being by some outside agency that was as yet unsuspected in the mind of humankind.

  But, he asked himself, why would they want to do it? What could be the motive?

  With a view, perhaps, of studying him as a representative specimen of the creature, Man? Or with the idea that somehow they could make some use of him?

  The thought struck him—was he the only man? Might there be others like him? Men who kept very silent about what was happening, for fear that human interference might spoil this good thing that they had?

  He rose slowly from the chair and went out in the hall. He picked up the phone directory and bought it back with him. He threw another log upon the fire and sat down in the chair, with the phone book in his lap.

  First himself, he thought; he would see if he was listed.

  He had no trouble finding it: Gray, Frederick, Helios III–SU 6-2649.

  He flipped the pages and started from the front, running his finger slowly down the column.

  The book was thin, but it took him quite a while, going carefully so that he would not miss another man from Earth. But there was no other listed; not from Earth, not from the solar system. He was the only one.

  Loneliness, he wondered. Or should it be just a touch of pride. To be the only one in the entire solar system.

  He took the directory back to the table in the hall and lying in the place where he had gotten it was another one.

  He stared at it and wondered if there were two of them, if there had been two of them all along and he had never noticed.

  He bent to look the closer at it and when he did he saw that it was not another directory, but a file of some sort, with his name printed across the top of it.

  He laid the directory down and took up the file. It was a bulky and a heavy thing, with great sheaves of papers enclosed between the covers.

  It had not been there, he was certain, when he’d gotten the directory. It had been placed there, as the food was placed upon the table, as the books had been stacked upon the shelves, as the clothing that would fit him had been hung within the closet. By some agency that was unobtrusive, if not invisible.

  Placement by remote control, he wondered. Could it be that somewhere this house was duplicated and that in that house certain agencies that were quite visible—and in their term of reference logical and ordinary—might place the food and hang the clothes and that at the moment of the action the same things happened in this house?

  And if that were the case, not only space was mastered, but time as well. For they—whoever they might be—could not have known about the books that should be placed upon the shelves until the occupant of this house had appeared upon the scene. They could not have known that it would be Frederick Gray, that it would be a man who had made the law his business, who would blunder on this house. They had set a trap—a trap?—and there would have been no way for them to know what quarry they might catch.

  It had taken time to print, by whatever process, the books upon the shelves. There would have been a searching for the proper books, and the translating and the editing. Was it possible, he wondered, that time could be so regulated that the finding and the translating and the editing, the printing and the placement, could have been compressed into no more than twenty-four hours as measured on the Earth? Could time be stretched out and, perhaps, foreshortened to accommodate the plans of those engineers who had built this house?

  He flipped open the cover of the file and the printing on the first page struck him in the face.

  SUMMARY & TRANSCRIPT

  Valmatan vs. Mer El

  Referral for Review Under Universal Law

  Panel for Review:

  Vanz Kamis, Rasalgethi VI

  Eta Nonskic, Thuban XXVIII

  Frederick Gray, Helios III

  Frozen, he stared at it.

  His hands began to tremble and he laid it down, carefully on the table top, as if it might be something that would shatter if he dropped it.

  Under universal law, he thought. Three students of the law, three experts (?), from three different solar systems!

  And the facts at issue, and the law, more than likely, from yet another system.

  Certain little services, the voice on the phone had told him.

  Certain little services. To pass judgment under laws and jurisprudence he had never heard of!

  And those others, he wondered—had they heard of them?

  Swiftly he bent and leafed through the phone book. He found Kamis, Vanz. Deliberately, he dialed the number.

  A pleasant voice said: “Vanz Kamis is not present at the moment. Is there any message?”

  And it was not right, thought Gray. He should not have phoned. There was no point in it.

  “Hello,” said the pleasant voice. “Are you there?”

  “Yes, I am here,” said Gray.

  “Vanz Kamis is not home. Is there any message?”

  “No,” said Gray. “No, thanks. There isn’t any message.”

  He should not have called, he thought. The act of phoning had been an act of weakness. This was a time when a man must rely upon himself. And he had to give an answer. It was not something that could be brushed off, it was not a thing that anyone could run from.

  He got his cap and jacket from the closet in the hall and let himself outside.

  A golden moon had risen, the lower half of it bearing on its face the dark silhouette of the jagged pines, growing on the ridge across the river. From somewhere in the forest an owl was muttering and down in the river a fish splashed as it jumped.

  Here a man could think, Gray told himself. He stood and drew the freshness of the air deep into his lungs. Here on the earth that was his own. Better than in a house that was, at least by implication, the extension of many other worlds.

  He went down the path to the landing where he had beached the canoe. The canoe was there and there was water in it from the storm of the night before. He tipped it on its edge so the wate
r could run out.

  To be reviewed, that first page had said, under universal law. And was there, he wondered, such a thing as universal law?

  Law could be approached in many ways, he thought. As pure philosophy, as political theory, as a history of moral ideas, as a social system, or as a set of rules. But however it was viewed, however studied, no matter what the emphasis, it had one basic function, the providing of a framework that would solve all social conflict.

  Law was no static thing; it must, and did, evolve. No matter how laggard it might be, still it followed in the footsteps of the society it served.

  He grinned wryly in the darkness, staring at the foaming river, remembering how, for years, he had hammered on that viewpoint in seminar and lecture.

  On one planet, given time and patience and the slow process of evolution, the law could be made to square with all social concepts and with the ordered knowledge of society at large.

  But was there any chance to broaden this flexibility and this logic to include not one, but many planets. Did there exist somewhere a basis for a legal concept that would apply to society in the universal sense?

  It could be true, he thought. Given wisdom and work, there was a bare chance of it.

  And if this should be the case, then he might be of service, or more correctly, perhaps, the law of Earth might be of help. For Earth need not be ashamed of what it had to offer. The mind of Man had lent itself to law. For more than five thousand years there was a record of Man’s concern with law and from that deep concern had come a legal evolution—or, more correctly, many evolutions. And in it might be found a point or two that could be incorporated in a universal code.

  There was, throughout the universe, a common chemistry, and because of this there were those who thought that there was a common biochemistry as well.

  Those other beings on those two other planets who had been named with him to review the issue set forth in the transcript could not be expected to be men, or even close to men. But given a common biochemistry, they would be basically the same sort of life as Man. They would be protoplasmic. They would make use of oxygen. The kind of things they were would be determined by nucleic acids. And their minds, while more than likely a far cry from a human mind, still would be based upon the same mechanism as the minds of Man.