Clifford Simak - A Death in the House - And Other Stories

“I suppose I should let them have their fun,” decided Wolfe.

“Turn the ground again,” said Munn. “Let us get on with our worm gathering. And no more talk of shop.”

“I was just going to tell you. They found Tuckerman.”

Munn looked up quickly from where he squatted by the shovel full of earth. “They found him! Then that means—”

“It means exactly what we had hoped. They found his fingerprints, dating back to the year nineteen fifty-eight.”

Munn picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers.

“Someday,” he said. “Someday we’ll get it. It will happen to someone else—to you, perhaps, or to me. And when it does we will be quick-witted enough to leave a clue behind for Joel, or some other bright young lad to follow.”

He squatted, musing. “We approach it from so many different angles largely because we are not sure—because we do not know exactly what we are searching for. I wonder if Tuckerman or Henderson. …” Munn made a gesture of impatience. “Turn the shovel, please.”

The sun had disappeared behind the trees on the hill across the meadow when Dr. Munn and Wolfe called it a day. They wound the lines around the poles, stuck the hooks into the floats and started for the house.

Munn’s eyes kept returning to the catch. “Best day all summer,” he said. “Now we can go back, and the figures and our thinking will be straight.”

They sneaked around to the back of the house and left the fish with the cook, who cursed mightily because he could see at a glance that a one-hour cleaning job lay ahead of him.

Nancy was waiting for them in the living room, her cheeks flushed, her eyes angry and accusing.

“Where have you been all afternoon?” she demanded. “Central Information has been calling you.”

Wolfe gave a guilty start. He’d forgotten all about Central Information. “Thanks,” he said, deciding there was no need to give her a detailed explanation.

He went into the office and closed the door, leaving Munn to Nancy’s seldom completely tender mercy.

Central Information made no attempt to disguise its exasperation. “We’ve been trying to get you all afternoon,” a reproachful voice said.

“I got tied up,” Wolfe explained.

“We have the information which you requested. Could we put it on the screen?”

Wolfe pushed the button for the vision plate, and the square lit up. A graph appeared upon it, neatly executed.

“We became intensely interested once we got into it,” Information told him. “You asked for a ten-year breakdown, but we went back fifty years. You will note the steady rise in disappearances, year by year. It is significant.”

“Significant of what?” asked Wolfe.

“Why, I wouldn’t know exactly. But there must be some significance. You will note the …”

“Thanks for calling it to my attention,” said Wolfe, grinning at having caught a busybody completely off base.

“There was something else,” said Information. “We just stumbled on it by accident. But it was so striking that we made up a graph for it as well.”

The first graph with its steadily ascending curve disappeared and was replaced by another which showed a steadily declining curve.

“This,” said Information, “shows the decrease in insanity over the same period of time. There probably is no relation between the two graphs, but if you will kindly note…”

The screen changed again and showed the two charts side by side.

“…if you will kindly note, the ascending and descending lines match almost perfectly.”

“I am extremely pleased,” said Wolfe, irritated beyond all reason, “to have my request supplemented by this astounding example of your enthusiastic research.”

“Thank you,” said the fatuous voice. “We felt you might be interested in such an unusual situation.”

“And what would you deduce from it, precisely? That persons who become insane run off immediately and lose themselves or—well, perhaps you have something even more startling to suggest.”

“We made no deduction, sir,” said the voice. “Our sole purpose is to provide requested data.”

“Which you have done most nobly,” said Wolfe, “far beyond the call of duty.”

But even as he mocked, he felt the first stir of excitement rising in his brain.

“We will send you all the data,” said Information, “by mail immediately. By special messenger, if you wish.”

“Special messenger, by all means,” said Wolfe, “and thank you very much.”

He replaced the receiver and sat stiffly in the dim light of the room.

Could the fatuous fools have stumbled onto something? Could there be some connection between the disappearances and insanity? Was there some significance in the fact that while the disappearances had steadily increased, insanity had waned? The two charts showed a direct relationship—but could the charts be trusted?

He sat there, thinking back across the years—his years on the project and all the other years before—when it had seemed that all reason and all human experience was against the project, that it would come to nothing and finally perish in the dust alongside the other vanities of Man. The long hard years of nothing and, at times, of worse than nothing—when hope itself seemed dead. And the lean years of frustration when the Telmont Evidences seemed to suggest that the project’s aim was far from hopeless, but did not point the way.

And finally, the years of fitful wonder, with the Whitherers watching impudently with their staring, sphinx-like eyes, while they did perhaps the very thing that man had tried and failed for two centuries to do—did it with no more thought or effort than a human might take in walking through a door from one room to another.

Was it then a natural ability rather than a formula which could be reduced to mathematics—a philosophic concept, the clever manipulation of universal factors? Was it something that might hide within Man’s brain, a latent ability late in developing, even unsuspected?

Suppose, Wolfe thought, just suppose—

Suppose that the disappearances were a safety valve precisely as insanity was a safety valve. Suppose that Man, after many centuries, had finally developed a better safety valve. Suppose that instead of going insane, a man, tormented beyond endurance by his problems, sought escape by going back through time. And suppose he discovered then that his problems had ceased to exist, since the circumstances which had created them had been swept away, and no longer had any real existence in time.

If that were true, then you’d have exactly what the graphs had shown—fewer cases of insanity, and more disappearance cases. And it made considerable sense, too, Wolfe told himself. It certainly made as much sense as insanity could ever make. Perhaps more sense, for insanity was a total waste, while a person who disappeared in time would still retain his own unique personality and his humanity.

Survival, he thought. It could be a survival factor. It could be something that was developing, under the press of circumstance, when the human race needed it desperately.

And if he was on the right track at last it would open up new avenues of research. You couldn’t, on the face of it, drive a man insane in order to push him into time, but there would be other means. And if it proved to be an ability innate within the mind, it was something that would eventually belong to the entire human race and would be the exact opposite of a piece of property that could be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

He felt shaken, but he was no longer tense. He got up from his desk and walked toward the door. But before he had taken five steps the portal burst open and Goff plunged into the room, gripping a frightened, elderly man by both elbows and propelling him forward. Goff had lost his cap and his hair was rumpled, his face convulsed with rage.