Clifford Simak - Ring Around the Sun

There were more sirens now and they were getting closer.

Vickers stepped off the sidewalk and dashed across the Street. A squad car screeched around a corner, skidding and whipping to get straightened out, its tires screaming on the pavement, its siren await as if in agony.

"I beg your pardon?"

Almost at the curb, Vickers stumbled and went sprawling. Instinctively, he pulled himself to hands and knees and flicked a sidewise glance to see the squad car bearing down upon him and he knew he could not make it, that before he could get his feet beneath him the car would be upon him.

A hand came down out of nowhere and fastened on his arm and jerked and he felt himself catapulting off the Street and across the sidewalk.

Another squad car came around the corner, skidding and with flattened tires protesting, almost as if the first had returned to make a second entrance.

The scattered crowd was running desperately.

The hand tugged at his arm and hauled him erect and Vickers saw the man for the first time, a man in a ragged sweater, with an old knife-mark jagged across his cheek.

"Quick," said the man, the knife-mark writhing with the words he spoke, teeth flashing in the whisker-shadowed face.

He shoved Vickers into a narrow alleyway between two buildings and Vickers sprinted, shoulders hunched, between the walls of brick that rose on either side.

He heard the man panting along behind him.

"To your right," said the man. "A door."

Vickers grasped the knob and the door swung open into a darkened hall.

The man stepped in beside him and closed the door and they stood together in the darkness, gasping with their running, the sound of them beating like an erratic heart in the confining darkness.

"That was close," the man said, "Those cops are getting on the ball. You no more than start a meeting and…"

He did not finish the sentence. Instead he reached out and touched Vickers on the arm.

"Follow me," he said. "Be careful. Stairs." Vickers followed, feeling his way down the creaky stairs, with the musty smell of cellar growing stronger with each step. At the bottom of the stairway, the man pushed aside a hanging blanket and they stepped into a dimly lighted room. There was an old, broken down piano in one corner and a pile of boxes in another and a table in the center, around which four men and two women sat.

One of the men said, "We heard the sirens."

Scar-face nodded. "Charley was just going good. The crowd was getting down to shouting."

"Who's your friend, George?" asked another one. "He was running," said George. "Police car almost got him." They looked at Vickers with interest. "What's your name, friend?" asked George. Vickers told them.

"Is he all right?" asked someone.

"He was there," said George. "He was running."

"But is it safe…"

"He's all right," said George, but Vickers noted that he said it too vehemently, too stubbornly, as if he now realized that he might have made a mistake in bringing a total stranger here.

"Have a drink," said one of the men. He shoved a bottle across the table toward Vickers.

Vickers sat down in a chair and took the bottle. One of the women, the better-looking of the two, said to him, "My name is Sally."

Vickers said, "I'm glad to know you, Sally." He looked around the table. None of the rest of them seemed ready to introduce themselves.

He lifted the bottle and drank. It was cheap stuff. He choked a little on it.

Sally said, "You an activist?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"An activist or purist?"

"He's an activist," said George. "He was right in there with he rest of them."

Vickers could see that George was sweating a little, afraid at he had made a mistake.

"He sure as hell doesn't look like one," said one of the men.

"I'm an activist," said Vickers, because he could see that was what they wanted him to be.

"He's like me," said Sally. "He's an activist by principle, but a purist by preference. Isn't that right?" she asked Vickers.

"Yes," said Vickers. "Yes, I guess that's it." He took another drink.

"What's your period?" Sally asked.

"My period," said Vickers. "Oh, yes, my period." And he remembered the white, intense face of Mrs. Leslie asking him what historic period he thought would be the most exciting.

"Charles the Second," he said.

"You were a little slow on that one," said one of the men, suspiciously.

"I fooled around some," said Vickers. "Dabbled, you know. Took me quite a while to find the one I liked."

"But you settled on Charles the Second," Sally said.

"That's right."

"Mine," Sally told him, "is Aztec."

"But, Aztec…"

"I know," she said. "It really isn't fair, is it? There's so little known about the Aztecs, really. But that way I can make it up as I go along. It's so much more fun that way."

George said, "It's all damn foolishness. Maybe it was all right to piddle around with diaries and pretending you were someone else when there was nothing else to do. But now we got something else to do."

"George is right," nodded the other woman.

"You activists are the ones who're wrong," Sally argued. "The basic thing in pretentionism is the ability to lift yourself out of your present time and space, to project yourself into another era."

"Now, listen here," said George. "I…"

"Oh, I agree," said Sally, "that we must work for this other world. It's the kind of opportunity we wanted all along. But that doesn't mean we have to give up…"

"Cut it out," said one of the men, the big fellow at the table's end. "Cut out all this gabbling. This ain't no place for it."

Sally said to Vickers, "We're having a meeting tonight. Would you like to come?"

He hesitated. In the dim light he could see that all of them were looking at him.

"Sure," he said. "Sure. It would be a pleasure."

He reached for the bottle and took another drink, then passed it on to George.

"There ain't nobody stirring for a while," said George. "Not until them cops have a chance to get cooled off a bit."

He took a drink and passed the bottle on.

THE meeting was just getting underway when Sally and Vickers arrived.

"Will George be here?" asked Vickers.

Sally laughed a little. "George here?" she asked.

Vickers shook his head. "I guess he's not the type."

"George is a roughneck," said Sally. "A red-hot. A born organizer. How he escaped communism is more than I'll ever know."

"And you? The ones like you?"

"We are the propagandists," she said. "We go to the meetings. We talk to people. We get them interested. We do the missionary work and get the converts who'll go out and preach. When we get them we turn them over to the people like George."

The dowager sitting at the table rapped with the letter opener she was using as a gavel.

"Please," she said. Her voice was aggrieved. "Please. This meeting will come to order."

Vickers held a chair for Sally, then sat down himself. The others in the room were quieting down.

The room, Vickers saw, was really two rooms — the living room and the dining room, with the French doors between them thrown open so that in effect they became one room.

Upper middle class, he thought. Just swank enough not to be vulgar, but failing the grandeur and the taste of the really rich. Real paintings on the wall and a Proven‡al fireplace and furniture that probably was of some period or other, although he couldn't name it,

He glanced at the faces around him and tried to place them. An executive type over there — a manufacturer's representative, he'd guess. And that one who needed a haircut might be a painter or a writer, although not a successful one. And the woman with the iron-grey hair and the outdoor tan was more than likely a member of some riding set.