Clifford Simak - A Choice of Gods

At first there was a fear that someone, returning from the stars, would coalesce, or otherwise come back together in their natural form, at the exact location of some solid object or, perhaps, another person, which in the last instance, would be extremely messy. I don't think there was ever any real need for appre hension, for as I understand it, the returning traveler, before he aims for his next point of materialization, peeps or scans or otherwise becomes aware of the situation and condition of the location he is aiming at. I must admit that I am very bad at writing this, for despite being associated with it for a number of years, I do not understand what is going on, which may be due to the fact that the ability which the others have developed has bypassed me entirely.

Anyhow—and this is what I have been leading up to—the large ballroom on the third floor has been set aside as the area in which returning travelers materialize, with the area barred to all others and a rule set up that the entire room be kept clear of any object. Some of the younger people called the room the Depot, harking back to those virtually prehistoric days when buses and trains arrived and departed from depots, and the name has stuck. There was at first a great deal of hilarity over the name, for to some of the young folks it seemed very humorous. I must admit that I see no particular humor in it, although I can see no real harm in whatever they may call it.

I have pondered the development of the entire business and, despite some of the theories advanced by others who have actually traveled (and therefore assume they know more of it than I), I believe that what we may have here is a normal evolutionary process—at least, that is what I would like to think it is. Man rose from a lowly primate to intelligence, became a toolmaker, a hunter, a farmer, a controller of his environment—he had progressed steadily through the years and the progress most admittedly has not always been for the good, either to himself or others. But the point is that he has progressed and this going to the stars may be only another evolutionary point that marks a further logical progression…

Jason couldn't go to sleep. He couldn't quit thinking about the Principle. What had started him to thinking on it he did not know, and as an exercise that might shake him loose from it, he tried to backtrack in his mind to the point where he had first begun his speculations, but the area was fogged and he could not get to the beginning of it and the wondering went on.

He should get to sleep, he told himself. Thatcher would wake him early in the morning and with John he'd set off down the path to Horace Red Cloud's camp. He looked forward to traveling up the river, for it would be interesting—it had been a long time since he had gone far from home—but no matter how interesting it might be, it would be a hard day for him and he needed sleep.

He tried counting sheep and tried adding a column of imaginary figures, but the sheep refused to jump and the figures faded off into the nothingness from which he'd summoned them and he was left with the worry and the wonder of the Principle.

If the universe were steady-state, if it had no beginning and would not have an end, if it had always existed and would continue to exist, at what point in this foreverness had the Principle come into being—or was it, as well as the universe, a foreverness? And if the universe were evolutionary, starting at a certain time and place and destined to come to an end at a certain time and place, had the Principle been there and waiting, a strangeness out of nothingness, or had it evolved only at a later time and from what had it evolved? And why this galaxy, he wondered—why had the Principle chosen to reside within this galaxy, when there were billions of other galaxies that could have been its home? Had it come into being in this galaxy and stayed here, and if that should be the case, what unique characteristics did this galaxy offer to trigger its appearance? Or was it a much larger thing than anyone might imagine, was the manifestation of it in this galaxy only an outpost of a much greater central unity?

It was all absurd, of course. There was no way in which he could find an answer; no means by which he could arrive at even a logical suspicion of what had really happened. He didn't have the data; no one had the data. The only one that would know would be the Principle itself. The whole procedure of his thinking, Jason knew, was an imbecilic exercise; there was no compelling reason for him to seek an answer. And yet his mind bored on and on and he could not stop it, hanging with desperation to an impossibility to which it never should have paid attention.

He turned over restlessly and tried to burrow his head deeper into the pillow.

"Jason," said Martha, out of the darkness, "are you asleep?"

He mumbled to her. "Almost," he said. "Almost."

He was polished and he shone in the morning light; he said his name was Stanley and he was glad that they had come. He recognized three of them— Hezekiah, Jason and Red Cloud, in that order—and he said that word and rumor of them had made its way into the Project. Introduced to John, he professed unusual pleasure at meeting a man from among the stars. He was suave and genteel and he glittered when he walked and he said it was neighborly of them to pay a visit, even after all the years, and that he was desolated he could offer neither food nor drink, since robots made no use of either.

Apparently a watch had been kept on them from the time of the flotilla's first appearance, coming up the river, for he had been waiting for them on the blufftop when they came climbing up the path, with the beached canoes and the men who had paddled them waiting on the shore below the bluff.

Above the blufftop towered the structure, whatever it might be—a huge and curving thinness that flared out, with a greater diameter at the top than at that point where it emerged from the ground, black with the shine of many metallic highlights that caught the morning sun, a huge and curving thinness that went up into the sky, more like a fantastic monument or a dreaming sculpture than it was like a structure and, looking at it, it seemed to make no sense. Set in a circle, it did not quite complete the circle, but stood with a V-section of emptiness gaping on one side of it.

From where they stood, at some distance beyond the flaring structure, lay the mounds of the ancient city, with here and there broken walls and the metallic skeletons of buildings still rising above the uneven ground, looking for all the world like the canted arms or the stiffened hands of corpses buried hurriedly and too shallowly for decency.

Across the river stood another mounded area, but here the disintegration of the buildings seemed somewhat less advanced, for at certain intervals great piles of masonry still emerged.

Stanley saw Jason looking at the structures. "The old university," he said. "We have been at great pains to preserve some selected buildings."

"You make use of them?"

"Of the contents of them. Certain instruments and libraries. Old workshops and laboratories. And what was missing in them we have transported, through the years, from other learning centers. Although," he said with a touch of sadness, "there's not much left elsewhere anymore."

"You used the knowledge to build this," said John, indicating the flaring structure with an upward sweep of his arm.

"We did," the robot Stanley said. "You came to hear of it?"

"That, in part," said Jason. "There is something more, however."

"We have a place," said Stanley, "where you can be far more comfortable than standing on this windswept prairie. If you will follow me."

Following him, they went along a beaten path until they came to a ramp that led down into the space enclosed by the flaring structure. As they walked down the ramp, they saw that less than half the structure stood above the ground, that its smooth sides went plunging down into a great hole that had been excavated to accommodate it. The ramp wound steeply downward, curving in a great sweep around the smooth wall of the flaring thing.