Clifford Simak - Ring Around the Sun

Vickers opened the door softly and slid out and closed the door behind him.

The door shut out the soft voice of the sound track: _come up and disappear — watch closely — come up and…_

Crawford was coming down the hall, lumbering along.

He saw Vickers and stopped.

"What do you want?" he asked. "What are you out here for?"

"A question," Vickers said, "One you didn't answer in there. Why did you spin that top?"

Crawford shook his head. "I can't understand it, Vickers. It doesn't make any sense, but I went into that fairyland once myself. Just like you, when I was a kid. I remembered it after I talked to you. Maybe because I talked to you. I remembered once I had sat on the floor and watched the top go round and wondered where the stripes were going — you know how they come up and disappear and then another one comes up and disappears. I wondered where they went and I got so interested that I must have followed them, for all at once I was in fairyland and there were a lot of flowers and I picked a flower and when I got back again I still had the flower and that's the way I knew I'd really been in fairyland. You see, it was winter and there were no flowers and when I showed the flower to mother…"

"That's enough," Vickers interrupted. There was sudden elation in his voice. "That is all I need."

Crawford stared at him. "You don't believe me?"

"I do."

"What's the matter with you, Vickers?"

"There is nothing wrong with me," said Vickers.

It hadn't been Ann Carter, after all!

Flanders and he and _Crawford_ — they were the three who had been given life from the body of Jay Vickers!

And Ann?

Ann had within her the life of that girl who had walked the valley with him — the girl he remembered as Kathleen Preston, but who had some other name. For Ann remembered the valley and that she had walked the valley in the springtime with someone by her side.

There might be more than Ann. There might be three of Ann just as there were three of him, but that didn't matter, either. Maybe Ann's name really was Ann Carter as his really was Jay Vickers. Maybe that meant that, when the lives drained back into the rightful bodies, it would be his consciousness and Ann's consciousness that would survive.

And it was all right now to love Ann. For she was a separate person and not a part of him.

Ann — _his_ Ann — had come back to this Earth to place a telephone call and to get Crawford from the room, so that he would not recognize the danger of the top spinning on screen, and now she'd gone back to the other world again and the threat was gone.

"Everything's all right," said Vickers. "Everything's just fine."

Soon he'd be going back himself and Ann would be waiting for him. And they'd be happy, the way she'd said they'd be, sitting there on a Manhattan hilltop waiting for the robots.

"Well, then," said Crawford. "Let's go back in again."

Vickers put out his arm to stop him. "There's no use of going in."

"No use?"

"Your directors aren't there," said Vickers. "They're in the second world. The one, you remember, that the Pretentionists preached about on Street corners all over town."

Crawford stared at him. "The top!"

"That's right."

"We'll start again," said Crawford. "Another board, another…"

"You haven't got the time," said Vickers. "This Earth is done. The people are fleeing from it. Even those who stay won't listen to you, won't fight for you."

"I'll kill you," Crawford said. "I'll kill you, Vickers."

"No, you won't."

They stood face to face silently, tensely.

"No," said Crawford. "No, I guess I won't. I should, but I can't. Why can't I kill you, Vickers?"

Vickers touched the big man's arm.

"Come on, friend," he said softly. "Or should I call you brother?"