Clifford Simak - A Heritage of Stars

She inclined her head toward the robot. "And what of him?" she asked.

"If he wishes, he can go with us. I've not talked with him about it."

"I sense about this enterprise," said Rollo, "a seeming urgency and purpose. Even not knowing what it is, I would be willing for the chance to associate myself with it. I pride myself that I might be of some small service. Not needing sleep myself, I could keep a watch while others slept. Being sharp of eye and swift of movement, I could do some scouting. I am well acquainted with the wilds, since I have been forced to live in them, well beyond the haunts of men. I would consume no supplies, since I live on solar energy alone. Give me a few days' sunshine and I have energy stored against a month or more. And I am a good companion, for I never tire of talk."

"That is right," said Cushing. "He has not stopped talking since the minute I found him."

"Reduced, at many times, I've been," said Rollo, "to talking to myself. Which is not bad if there is no one else to talk with. Talking with oneself, it's possible to find many areas of precise agreement, and one need never talk on subjects that are not agreeable.

"The best year I ever spent was long ago when, in the depths of the Rockies, I chanced upon an old mountain man who stood in need of help. He was an ancient personage who had fallen victim to a strange disease of stiffening muscles and aching joints, and had it not been for my coming accidentally upon him, he would not have lasted out the winter, since when the told came he would not have been capable of hunting meat or bringing in the wood that was needed to keep his cabin warm. I stayed with him and brought in game and wood, and since he was as starved for talk as I was, we talked away the winter, he telling of great events in which he had participated or to which he had been a witness, and in many of them there may have been something less than truth, although I never questioned them, for so far as I was concerned, talk, not truth, was paramount. And I spinning tales for him, but little ornamented, of the day's I'd spent since the Time of Trouble. Early the next summer, when the pain in him was less and he was able to make his way about, he set off for what he called a "rendezvous," a summer place of meeting for others such as he. He asked me to go with him, but I declined, for truth to tell, I no longer have any love of man. Excepting the present company, which seems well intentioned, I have had nothing except trouble in those few times I have blundered into men.

"You can remember tile Time of Trouble, then?" said Cushing. "You have lived through it all, and your memory's clear?"

"Oh, clear enough," said Rollo. "I recall the things that happened, but it would be bootless for you to ask me the meaning of it, for I had no understanding of it then, and despite much thinking on it, have no understanding of it now. You see, I was a common yard robot, a runner of errands and a performer of chores. I had no training except in simple tasks, although I understand there were many of my kind who did have some special training, who were skilled technicians and many other things. My memories mostly are unpleasant, although in recent centuries I have learned to live with existing situations, taking each day as it comes and not ranting against conditions as they are. I was not designed to be a lonely mechanism hut that is what I have been forced to become. I have, through bitter circumstances, become able to live for and of myself, although I am never really happy of it. That is why I have so willingly suggested that I associate myself with your enterprise."

"Not even knowing," Meg asked, "what the enterprise might be?"

"Even so," said Rollo, "if it so happens later on that I do not like the look or smell of it, I can simply walk away.

"It's no evil enterprise," said Cushing. "It's a simple search. We are looking for a Place of Going to the Stars."

Rob nodded sagely. "I have heard of it. Not extensively. Nothing that is greatly known, but of which one hears occasionally, many years apart. It is situated, as best I can determine, on a mesa or a butte somewhere in the West. The mesa or the butte is ringed in by an extensive growth of Trees that legend says keep watch upon the place and will allow no one to enter. And there are other devices, it is said, that guard it, although of those devices I have no true and certain knowledge."

"Then there is such a place?"

Rollo spread his hands. "Who knows. There are many tales of strange places, strange things, strange people. The old man I spent the winter with mentioned it—I think only once. But he told many stories and not all of them were truth. He said the place was called Thunder Butte."

"Thunder Butte," said Cushing. "Would you know where Thunder Butte might be?"

Rollo shook his head. "Somewhere in the Great Plains country. That is all I know. Somewhere beyond the great Missouri."

Excerpt from Wilson's History:

One of the strange evolutions which seems to have followed the Collapse and which has developed in the centuries since is the rise of special human faculties and abilities. There are many stories of certain personalities who possess these abilities, some of them surpassing all belief although as to the truth of them, there is none to say.

On the shelves at this university is an extensive literature on the possibilities of the paranormal and, in fact, some case histories that would appear to indicate the realization of such possibilities. It is only fair to point out, however, that a great part of this literature is theoretical and in some instances controversial. On a close examination of the pre-Collapse literature (which is all we have, of course), it would appear reasonable to conclude that there are enough convincing instances reported of the psychic or the paranormal to lend some substance to a belief that some of the theories may be correct. Since the Collapse, although there has been no documentation upon which a judgment can be founded, it appears that a greater concentration of paranormal and psychic phenomena has been observed than was the case before. One must realize, certainly, that none of these reports can be subjected to the kind of critical examination and survey as was possible in the past. For this reason, that none of them is weeded out, they may appear to be more frequent than they really are. Each instance, once it is reported, becomes a story to be told in wondering amazement and with no great concern as to whether it be true or not. But even taking all this into account, the impression still holds that this type of phenomenon is, indeed, increasing.

There are those at this university, with whom I've talked, who feel that this increase may be due, in part at least, to the lifting and the shattering of the physically scientific and technological mold which prior to the Collapse encased all humanity. If a man (or a woman), these colleagues of mine point out, is told often enough that something is impossible, or worse, is foolishness, then there is a lessening of the willingness to believe in it, or to subscribe to it. This might mean that those pre-Collapse people who had a bent toward the psychic or the paranormal may have squelched their own abilities or (much to the same point) any dedicated belief in their abilities (for who would fly in the face of impossibility or engage in foolish practices?), with the result that any progress in the field was thwarted. The end result would be that an entire field of human endeavors and abilities may have been sidetracked, if not eliminated, in the face of the technologically minded dictum that they were either foolish or impossible.

Today no such dictum remains. Technological thinking was at least discredited, if not entirely wiped out, with the destruction of the machines and the social systems they had built. Which, after a century or two, left the human race free to carry out that foolishness which before had been frowned upon, if not, indeed, proscribed, by a technological mentality. It may be, too, that the present situation created a climate and environment in which non-technological thinking and approaches to human problems have a chance to thrive. One wonders, thinking of it, what the world might have been if the science that man had subscribed to had not been almost exclusively a physical and a biological science and if, in such a case, technology had not come about. The best situation, of course, would have been if all sciences and the ideas deriving from them had been allowed equality, so that all could work together and interact. The way it turned out, however, was that the arrogance of one way of thought served to strangle all other ways of thought…