Clifford Simak - Ring Around the Sun

He reached the white picket fence that ran around the house and stopped beside the gate and leaned upon it, looking at the house. It was exactly as he had remembered it, neat, well-kept, with the lawn well-trimmed and flowers growing brightly in neat beds, with the woodwork newly painted and the brick a mellow color attesting to years of sun upon it and the force of wind and rain.

"Kathleen," he said, and he couldn't say the name too well, for his lips were parched and rough. "I've come back again."

He wondered what she'd look like, after all these years. He must not, he warned himself, except to see the girl he once had known, the girl of seventeen or eighteen, but a woman near his own age.

She would see him standing at the gate and even with the beard and the tattered clothes and the weeks of travel on him, she would know him and would open the door and come down the walk to greet him.

The door opened and the sun was in his eyes so that he could not see her until she'd stepped out on the porch.

"Kathleen," he said.

But it wasn't Kathleen.

It was someone he'd never seen before — a man who had on almost no clothes at all and who glittered in the sun as he walked down the path and who said to Vickers, "Sir, what can I do for you?"

THERE was something about the glitter of the man in the morning sun, something about the way he walked and the way he talked that didn't quite fit in. He had no hair, for one thing. His head was absolutely bald and there was no hair on his chest. His eyes were funny, too. They glittered like the rest of him and he seemed to have no lips.

"I'm a robot, sir," said the glittering man, seeing Vickers' puzzlement.

"Oh," said Vickers.

"My name is Hezekiah."

"How are you, Hezekiah?" Vickers asked inanely, not knowing what else to say.

"I'm all right," replied Hezekiah. "I am always all right. There is nothing to go wrong with me. Thank you for asking, sir."

"I had hoped to find someone here," said Vickers. "A Miss Kathleen Preston. Does it happen she is home?"

He watched the robot's eyes and there was nothing in them.

The robot asked, "Won't you come in, sir, and wait?"

The robot held the gate open for him and he came through, walking on the walk of mellowed brick and he noticed how the brick of the house was mellowed, as well, by many years of sun and by the lash of wind and rain. The place, he saw, was well kept up. The windows sparkled with the cleanliness of a recent washing and the shutters hung true and straight and the trim was painted and the lawn looked as if it had not been only mowed, but razored. Gay beds of flowers bloomed without a single weed and the picket fence marched its eternal guard around the house straight as wooden soldiers and painted gleaming white.

They went around the house, and the robot turned and went up the steps to the little porch that opened on the side entrance and pushed the door open for Vickers to go through.

"To your right, sir," Hezekiah said. "Take a chair and wait. If there is anything you wish, there is a bell upon the table."

"Thank you, Hezekiah," Vickers said.

The room was large for a waiting room. It was gaily papered and had a small marble fireplace with a mirror over the mantle and there was a hush about the room, a sort of official hush, as if the place might be an antechamber for important happenings.

Vickers took a chair and waited.

What had he expected? Kathleen bursting from the house and running down the steps to meet him, happy after twenty years of never hearing of him? He shook his head. He had indulged in wishful thinking. It didn't work that way. It wasn't logical that it should.

But there were other things that were not logical, either, and they had worked out. It had not been logical that he should find this house in this other world, and still he had found it and now sat beneath its roof and waited. It had not been logical that he should find the top he had not remembered and finding it, know what to use it for. But he had found it and he had used it and was here.

He sat quietly, listening to the house.

There was a murmur of voices in the room that opened off the waiting room and he saw that the door which led into it was open for an inch or two.

There was no other sound. The house lay in morning quiet.

He got up from his chair and paced to the window and from the window back to the marble fireplace.

Who was in that other room? Why was he waiting? Who would he see when he walked through that door and what would they say to him?

He swung around the room, walking softly, almost sneaking. He stopped beside the door, standing with his back against the wall, holding his breath to listen.

The murmur of voices became words.

"…going to be a shock."

A deep, gruff voice said, "It always is a shock. There's nothing you can do to take the shock away. No matter how you look at it, it always is degrading."

A slow, drawling voice said, "It's unfortunate we have to work it the way we do. It's too bad we can't let them go on in their legal bodies."

Businesslike, clipped, precise, another voice, the first voice, said, "Most of the androids take it fairly well. Even knowing what it means, they take it fairly well. We make them understand. And, of course, out of the three, there's always the lucky one, the one that can go in his actual body."

"I have a feeling," said the gruff voice, "that we started in on Vickers just a bit too soon."

"Flanders said we had to. He thinks Vickers is the only one that can handle Crawford."

And Flanders' voice saying, "I am sure he can. He was a late starter, but he was coming fast. We gave it to him hard. First the bug got careless and he caught it and that set him to thinking. Then, after that, we arranged the lynching threat. Then he found the top we planted and the association clicked. Give him just another jolt or two…"

"How about that girl, Flanders? That — what's her name?"

"Ann Carter," Flanders said. "We've been jolting her a bit, but not as hard as Vickers."

"How will they take it?" asked the drawling voice. "When they find they're android?"

Vickers lurched away from the door, moving softly, groping with his hands, as if he were walking in the dark through a room peopled with obstructing furniture.

He reached the door that led into the hall and grasped the casing and hung on.

Used, he thought.

Not even human.

"Damn you, Flanders," he said.

Not only he, but Ann — not mutants, not superior beings at all, not any sort of humans. Androids!

He had to get away, he told himself. He had to get away and hide. He had to find a place where he could curl up and hide and lick his wounds and let his, mind calm down and plan what he meant to do.

For he was going to do something. It wasn't going to stay this way. He'd deal himself a hand and cut in on the game.

He moved along the hall and reached the door and opened it a crack to see if anyone was there. The lawn was empty. There was no one in sight.

He went out the door and closed it gently behind him and when he hit the ground, jumping from the tiny porch, he was running. He leaped the fence and hit the ground, still running.

He didn't look back until he reached the trees. When he did, the house stood serenely, majestically, on its hilltop at the valley's head.

So he was an android, an artificial man, a body made out of a handful of chemicals and the cunning of man's mind and the wizardry of man's technique — but out of the cunning and the wizardry of the mutant mind, for the ordinary, normal men who walked the parent Earth, the original Earth, had no such cunning of their minds, they could make an artificial man and make him so well and cleverly that even he, himself, would never know for sure. And artificial women, too — like Ann Carter.