Robert Silverberg - Neighbor

Fresh snow had fallen during the night. It lay like a white sheet atop the older snow, nine or ten feet of it, that already covered the plain. Now all was smooth and clear almost to the horizon. As Michael Holt peered through the foot-thick safety glass of his command-room window, he saw, first of all, the zone of brown earth, a hundred yards in diameter, circling his house, and then the beginning of the snowfield with a few jagged bare trees jutting through it, and then, finally, a blot on the horizon, the metallic tower that was Andrew McDermott’s dwelling.

Not in seventy or eighty years had Holt looked at the McDermott place without feeling hatred and irritation. The planet was big enough, wasn’t it? Why had McDermott chosen to stick his pile of misshapen steel down right where Holt had to look at it all his days? The McDermott estate was large. McDermott could have built his house another fifty or sixty miles to the east, near the banks of the wide, shallow river that flowed through the heart of the continent. He hadn’t cared to. Holt had politely suggested it, when the surveyors and architects first came out from Earth. McDermott had just as politely insisted on putting his house where he wanted to put it.

It was still there. Michael Holt peered at it, and his insides roiled. He walked to the control console of the armament panel, and let his thin, gnarled hands rest for a moment on a gleaming rheostat.

There was an almost sexual manner to the way Holt fondled the jutting knobs and studs of the console. Now that his two-hundredth year was approaching, he rarely handled the bodies of his wives any more. But, then, he did not love his wives as keenly as he loved the artillery emplacement with which he could blow Andrew McDermott to atoms.

Just let him provoke me, Holt thought.

He stood by the panel, a tall, gaunt man with a withered face and a savage hook of a nose and a surprisingly thick shock of faded red hair. He closed his eyes and allowed himself the luxury of a daydream.

He imagined that Andrew McDermott had given him offense. Not simply the eternal offense of being there in his view, but some direct, specific affront. Poaching on his land, perhaps. Or sending a robot out to hack down a tree on the borderland. Or putting up a flashing neon sign mocking Holt in some vulgar way. Anything that would serve as an excuse for hostilities.

And then: Holt saw himself coming up here to the command room and broadcasting an ultimatum to the enemy. “Take that sign down, McDermott,” he might say. “Keep your robots off my land,” perhaps. “Or else this means war.”

McDermott would reply with a blast of radiation, of course, because that was the kind of sneak he was. The deflector screens of Holt’s frontline defenses would handle the bolt with ease, soaking it in and feeding the energy straight to Holt’s own generators.

Then, at long last, Holt would answer back. His fingers would tighten on the controls. Crackling arcs of energy would leap toward the ionosphere and bound downward at McDermott’s place, spearing through his pitiful screens as though they weren’t there. Holt saw himself gripping the controls with knuckle-whitening fervor, launching thunderbolt after thunderbolt, while on the horizon Andrew McDermott’s hideous keep blazed and glowed in hellish fire, and crumpled and toppled and ran in molten puddles over the snow.

Yes, that would be the moment to live for!

That would be the moment of triumph!

To step back from the controls at last and look through the window and see the glowing red spot on the horizon where the McDermott place had been. To pat the controls as though they were the flanks of a beloved old horse. To leave the house, and ride across the borderland into the McDermott estate, and see the charred ruin, and know that he was gone forever.

Then, of course, there would be an inquiry. The fifty lords of the planet would meet to discuss the battle, and Holt would explain, “He wantonly provoked me. I need not tell you how he gave me offense by building his house within my view. But this time—”

And Holt’s fellow lords would nod sagely, and would understand, for they valued their own unblemished views as highly as Holt himself. They would exonerate him and grant him McDermott’s land, as far as the horizon, so no newcomer could repeat the offense.

Michael Holt smiled. The daydream left him satisfied. His heart raced perhaps a little too enthusiastically as he pictured the slagheap on the horizon. He made an effort to calm himself. He was, after all, a fragile old man, much as he hated to admit it, and even the excitement of a daydream taxed his strength.

He walked away from the panel, back to the window. Nothing had changed. The zone of brown earth where his melters kept back the snow, and then the white field, and finally the excrescence on the horizon, glinting coppery red in the thin midday sunlight. Holt scowled. The daydream had changed nothing. No shot had been fired. McDermott’s keep still stained the view. Turning, Holt began to shuffle slowly out of the room, toward the dropshaft that would take him five floors downward to his family.

The communicator chimed. Holt stared at the screen in surprise.

“Yes?”

“An outside call for you, Lord Holt. Lord McDermott is calling,” the bland metallic voice said.

“Lord McDermott’s secretary, you mean.”

“It is Lord McDermott himself, your lordship.”

Holt blinked. “You’re joking,” he said. “It’s fifty years since he called me. If this is a prank, I’ll have your circuits shorted!”

“I cannot joke, your lordship. Shall I tell Lord McDermott you do not wish to speak to him?”

“Of course,” Holt snapped. “No…wait. Find out what he wants. Then tell him I can’t speak to him.”

Holt sank back into a chair in front of the screen. He nudged a button with his elbow, and tiny hands began to massage the muscles of his back, where tension-poisons had suddenly flooded in to stiffen him.

McDermott calling? What for?

To complain, of course. Some trespass, no doubt. Some serious trespass, if McDermott felt he had to make the call himself. Michael Holt’s blood warmed. Let him complain! Let him accuse, let him bluster! Perhaps this would give the excuse for hostilities at last. Holt ached to declare war. He had been building his armaments patiently for decade after decade, and he knew beyond doubt that he had the capability to destroy McDermott moments after the first shot was fired. No screens in the universe could withstand the array of weaponry Holt had assembled. The outcome of a conflict was in no doubt. Let him start something, Michael Holt prayed. Oh, let him be the aggressor! I’m ready for him, and more than ready!

The bell chimed again. The robot voice of Holt’s secretary said, “I have spoken to him, your lordship. He will tell me nothing. He wants to speak to you.”

Holt sighed. “Very well. Put him on, then.”

There was a moment of electronic chaos on the screen as the robot shifted from the inside channel to an outside one. Holt sat stiffly, annoyed by the sudden anxiety he felt. He realized, strangely, that he had forgotten what his enemy’s voice sounded like. All communications between them had been through robot intermediaries for years.

The screen brightened and showed a test pattern. A hoarse, querulous voice said, “Holt? Holt, where are you?”

“Right here in my chair, McDermott. What’s troubling you?”

“Turn your vision on. Let me have a look at you, Holt.”

“You can speak your piece without seeing me, can’t you? Is my face that fascinating to you?”

“Please. This is no time for bickering. Turn the vision on!”