Clifford Simak - City

Webster stared at it, tight-lipped.

He should have expected it.

He thought of Joe with a flare of murderous fury surging through his brain. For that call had been a cackling chortle behind a covering hand, a smart-Aleck gesture designed to let man know what it was all about, to let him know after he was behind the eight-ball and couldn't do a thing about it.

We should have killed them off, thought Webster, and was surprised at the calm coldness of the thought. We should have stamped them out like we would a dangerous disease.

But man had forsaken violence as a world and individual policy. Not for one hundred and twenty-five years had one group been arrayed against another group in violence.

When Joe had called, the Juwain philosophy had lain on the desk. I had only to reach out my hand and touch it, Webster thought.

He stiffened with the realization of it. I had only to reach out my hand and touch it. And I did just that!

Something more than telepathy, something more than guessing. Joe knew he would pick up the kaleidoscope – must have known it. Foresight – an ability to roll back the future. Just an hour or so, perhaps, but that would be enough.

Joe – and the other mutants, of course – had known about Fowler. Their probing, telepathic minds could have told them all that they wished to know. But this was something else, something different.

He stood at the window, staring at the sign. Thousands of people, he knew, were seeing it. Seeing it and feeling that sudden sick impact in their mind.

Webster frowned, wondering about the shifting pattern of the lights. Some physiological impact upon a certain centre of the human brain, perhaps. A portion of the brain that had not been used before – a portion of the brain that in due course of human development might naturally have come into its proper function. A function now that was being forced.

The Juwain philosophy, at last! Something for which men had sought for centuries, now flnally come to pass. Given man at a time when he'd have been better off without it.

Fowler had written in his report: I cannot give a factual account because there are no words for the facts that I want to tell. He still didn't have the words, of course, but he had something else that was even better – an audience that could understand the sincerity and the greatness which lay beneath the words be did have. An audience with a new-found sense which would enable them to grasp some of the mighty scope of the thing Fowler had to tell.

Joe had planned it that way. Had waited for this moment. Had used the Juwain philosophy as a weapon against the human race.

For with the Juwain philosophy, man would go to Jupiter. Faced by all the logic in the world, he still would go to Jupiter. For better or for worse, he would go to Jupiter.

The only chance there had ever been of winning against Fowler had been Fowler's inability to describe what he saw, to tell what he felt, to reach the people with a clear exposition of the message that he brought. With mere human words that message would have been vague and fuzzy and while the people at first might have believed, they would have been shaky in their belief, would have listened to other argument.

But now that chance was gone, for the words would be no longer vague and fuzzy. The people would know, as clearly and as vibrantly as Fowler knew himself what Jupiter was like.

The people would go to Jupiter, would enter upon a life other than the human life.

And the Solar System, the entire Solar System, with the exception of Jupiter, would lie open for the new race of mutants to take over, to develop any kind of culture that they might wish – a culture that would scarcely follow the civilization of the parent race.

Webster swung away from the window, strode back to the desk. He stooped and pulled out a drawer, reached inside. His hand came out clutching something that he had never dreamed of using – a relic, a museum piece he had tossed there years before.

With a handkerchief, he polished the metal of the gun, tested its mechanism with trembling fingers.

Fowler was the key. With Fowler dead With Fowler dead and the Jupiter stations dismantled and abandoned, the mutants would be licked. Man would have the Juwain philosophy and would retain his destiny. The Centauri expedition would blast off for the stars. The life experiments would continue on Pluto. Man would march along the course that his culture plotted.

Faster than ever before. Faster than anyone could dream. Two great strides. The renunciation of violence as a human policy – the understanding that came with the Juwain philosophy. The two great things that would speed man along the road to wherever he was going.

The renunciation of the violence and the Webster stared at the gun clutched in his hand and heard the roar of winds tumbling through his head.

Two great strides – and he was about to toss away the first.

For one hundred and twenty-five years no man had killed another – for more than a thousand years killing had been obsolete as a factor in the determination of human affairs.

A thousand years of peace and one death might undo the work. One shot in the night might collapse the structure, might hurl man back to the old bestial thinking.

Webster killed – why can't I? After all, there are some men who should be killed. Webster did right, but he shouldn't have stopped with only one. I don't see why they're hanging him; he'd ought to get a medal. We ought to start on the mutants first. If it hadn't been for them That was the way they'd talk.

That, thought Webster, is the wind that's roaring in my brain.

The flashing of the crazy coloured sign made a ghostly flicker along the walls and floor.

Fowler is seeing that, thought Webster. He is looking at it and, even if he isn't, I still have the kaleidoscope.

He'll be coming in and we'll sit down and talk. We'll sit down and talk

He tossed the gun back into the drawer, walked towards the door.

If there has been any doubt concerning the origin of the other tales in the legend, there can be no doubt in this. Here, in the sixth tale, we have unmistakably the hallmarks of Doggish story telling. It has the deeper emotional value, the close attention to ethical matters which are stressed in all other Doggish myths.

And yet, strangely enough, it is in this particular tale that Tige finds his weightiest evidence of the actuality of the human race. Here, he points out, we have evidence that the Dogs told these self-same tales before – the blazing fire when they sat and talked of Man buried in Geneva or gone to Jupiter. Here, he says, we are given an account of the Dogs' first probing into the cobbly worlds, their first step towards the development of an animal brotherhood.

Here, too, he thinks, we have evidence that Man was another contemporary race which went part way down the path of culture with the Dogs. Whether or not the disaster which is portrayed in this tale is the one which actually overwhelmed Man, Tige says, we cannot be sure. He admits that through the centuries the tale as we know it today has been embellished and embroidered. But it does provide, he contends, good and substantial evidence that some disaster was visited upon the human race.

Rover, who does not admit to the factual evidence seen by Tige, believes that the storyteller in this tale brings to a logical conclusion a culture such as Man developed. Without at least broad purpose, without certain implanted stability, no culture can survive, and this is the lesson, Rover believes, the tale is meant to spell.