Clifford Simak - Ring Around the Sun

The mutants could make androids and robots and Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and a host of other gadgets, all designed to wreck the economy of the race from which they sprang. They had synthesized the carbohydrate as food and the protein to make the bodies of their androids, and they knew how to travel from one earth to another — all those earths that trod on one another's heels down the corridors of time. This much he knew they could do and were doing. What other things they might be doing, he had no idea. Nor no idea, either, of the things they dreamed or planned.

"You're a mutant," Crawford had told him, "an undeveloped mutant. You're one of them." For Crawford had an intelligent machine that could pry into the mind and tell its owner what was in the mind, but the machine was stupid in the last analysis, for it couldn't even tell a real man from a fake.

No mutant, but a mutant's errand boy. Not even a man, only an artificial copy.

How many others, he wondered, could there be like him? How many of his kind might roam the Earth, going about their appointed tasks for the mutant master? How many of his kind did Crawford's men trail and watch, not suspecting that they did not trail and watch the mutant, but a thing of mutant manufacture? That, thought Vickers, was the true measure of the difference between the normal man and mutant — that the normal man could mistake the mutant's scarecrow for the mutant.

The mutants made a man and turned him loose and watched him and allowed him to develop and set a spying mechanism that they called a bug to watch him, a little mechanical mouse that could be smashed with a paper weight.

And in the proper time they jolted him — they jolted him for what? They stirred up his fellow townsmen so he fled a lynching party; they planted for him to find a toy out of childhood and waited to see if the toy might not trip a childhood association; they fixed it so he would drive a Forever car when they knew that driving such a car could cause him to be mobbed.

And after they had jolted an android, what happened to him then?

What happened to the androids once they had been used for the purpose of their making?

He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he'd talk to him again. And now he knew something of what was going on and Crawford might be very interested.

And something else as well — some tugging, nagging knowledge that seemed to bubble in his brain, trying to get out. Something that he knew, but could not remember.

He walked on through the woods, with its massive trees and its deep-laid forest mold and thick matting of old leaves, with its mosses and its flowers and its strange silence filled with uncaring and with comfort.

He had to find Ann Carter. He had to tell her what was going on and together, the two of them would somehow stand against it.

He halted beside the great oak tree and stared up at its leaves and tried to clear his mind, to wipe it clean of the chaos of his thinking so he could start fresh again.

There were two things that stood out above all others:

He had to get back to the parent Earth.

He had to find Ann Carter.

VICKERS did not see the man until he spoke.

"Good morning, stranger," someone said, and Vickers wheeled around. The man was there, standing just a few feet away, a great, tall, strong man dressed much as a farm hand or a factory worker might be dressed, but with a jaunty, peaked cap set upon his head and a brilliant feather stuck into the cap.

Despite the rudeness of his clothing, there was nothing of the peasant about the man, but a cheerful self-sufficiency that reminded Vickers of someone he'd read about and he tried to think who it might be, but the comparison eluded him.

Across the man's shoulder was a strap that held a quiver full of arrows and in his hand he held a bow. Two young rabbits hung lifeless from his belt and their blood had smeared his trouser leg.

"Good morning," said Vickers, shortly.

He didn't like the idea of this man popping up from nowhere.

"You're another one of them," the man said.

"Another one of what?"

The man laughed gaily, "We get one of you every once in a while," he said. "Someone who has blundered through and doesn't know where he is. I've often wondered what happened to them before we were settled here or what happens to them when they pop through a long ways from any settlement."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Another thing you don't know," said the man, "is where you are."

"I have a theory," Vickers said. "This is a second earth."

The man chuckled. "You got it pegged pretty close," he said. "You're better than the most of them. They just flounder around and gasp and won't believe it when we tell them that this is Earth Number Two."

"That's neat," said Vickers. "Earth Number Two, is it? And what about Number Three?"

"It's there, waiting when we need it. Worlds without end, waiting when we need them. We can go on pioneering for generation after generation. A new earth for each new generation if need be, but they say we won't be needing them that fast."

"They?" challenged Vickers. "Who are they?"

"The mutants," said the man. "The local ones live in the Big House. You didn't see the Big House?"

Vickers shook his head, warily.

"You must have missed it, coming up the ridge. A big brick place with a white picket fence around it and other buildings that look like barns, but they aren't barns."

"Aren't they?"

"No," said the man. "They are laboratories and experimental buildings and there is one building that is fixed up for listening."

"Why do they have a place for listening? Seems to me you could listen almost anywhere. You and I can listen without having a special place fixed up for us."

"They listen to the stars," the man told him.

"They listen…" began Vickers, and then remembered Flanders sitting on the porch in Cliffwood, rocking in the chair and saying that great pools and reservoirs of knowledge existed in the stars, that it was there for the taking and you might not need rockets to go there and get it, but might reach out with your mind and that you'd have to sift and winnow, but you'd find much that you could use.

"Telepathy?" asked Vickers.

"That's it," said the man. "They don't listen to the stars really, but to people who live on the stars. Now ain't that the screwiest thing you ever heard of — listening to the stars!"

"Yes, I guess it is," said Vickers.

"They get ideas from these people. They don't talk to them, I guess. They just listen in on them. They catch some of the things they're thinking and some of the things they know and a lot of it they can use and a lot of it don't make no sense at all. But it's the truth, so help me, mister."

"My name is Vickers. Jay Vickers."

"Well, I'm glad to know you, Mr. Vickers. My name is Asa Andrews."

He walked forward and held out his hand and Vickers took it and their grip was hard and sure.

And now he knew where he'd read of this man before. Here before him stood an American pioneer, the man who carried the long rifle from the colonies to the hunting grounds of Kentucky. Here was the stance, the independence, the quick good will and wit, the steady self reliance. Here, once again, in the forests of Earth Number Two, was another pioneer type, sturdy and independent and a good man for a friend.

"These mutants must be the people who are putting out the everlasting razor and all that other stuff in the gadget shops," said Vickers.

"You catch on quick," said Andrews. "We'll go up to the Big House in a day or two and you can talk to them."

He shifted the bow from one hand to another. "Look, Vickers, did you leave someone back there? A wife and some kids, maybe?"