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

He almost pushed me into a deep, upholstered chair in one corner of the office and went to a small bar under the windows.

“Have you a preference, Charley?”

“If you have some scotch,” I said.

He came back with the glasses, handed one to me and sat down in an opposite chair.

“Now we can talk,” he said. “But get down a slug of liquor first. You know, all these years I’ve been sort of expecting you. Not wondering when you would show up, of course, but if you would.”

“Afraid I would,” I said.

“Well, maybe something of that, too. But not very much. Slightly embarrassing, of course, but—”

Kirby left the sentence hanging in the air. I took a snort of scotch. “I asked you about Mary.”

He shook his head. “She won’t be coming. She went the other way.”

“You mean into the past.”

“That’s right. We’ll talk about it later.”

“I see the time contraption’s gone. Did I shut it off?”

“You shut it off.”

“I wondered if maybe Leonard or Old Prather—”

He shrugged. “Not Leonard. He was a basket case. And Old Prather—well, you see, Old Prather never was a part of it. He never really was a part of anything at all. He stood outside of everything. Only an observer. That was his way of life, his function. He had people doing things for him—”

“I see,” I said. “So you got it out of there. Where is it now?”

“It? You mean the engine?”

“That’s right.”

“Right at the moment it’s up in the Astrophysics Building.”

“I don’t remember—”

“It’s new,” he said. “The first new building on the campus for more than fifty years. It and the spaceport.”

I came half out of my chair, then settled back again. “A spaceport—”

“Charley,” said Kirby, “we’ve been out to the Centauri system and 61 Cygni.”

“We?”

“Us. Right here. Coon Creek Institute.”

“Then it worked!”

“You’re damned right it worked.”

“The stars,” I said. “My God, we’re going to the stars! You know, that night when we met out on the hill… that night I wanted to shout to the stars, to tell them we were coming. What have you found out there?”

“Centauri, nothing. Just the three stars. Interesting, of course, but no planets. Not even space-debris. A planetary system never formed, never got started. Cygni has planets, twelve of them, but nothing one could land on. Methane giants, others that are in the process of forming crusts, one burned-out cinder close up to the sun.”

“Then there are planets.”

‘Yes, millions, billions of solar systems. Or at least that’s what we think.”

“You say us. How about the others? How about the government?”

“Charley,” he said, “you don’t understand. We are the only ones who have it. No one else.”

“But—”

“I know. They’ve tried. We’ve said no. Remember, we are a private institution. Not a dime of federal or state or any other kind of money—”

“Coon Creek,” I said, half choking at the ridiculous thought of it. “Good old Coon Creek, come into its own.”

“We’ve had to set up a security system,” Kirby said primly. “We have all sort of sensors and detectors and guards three deep around the place. It plays hell with the budget.”

“You say you have the engine here. That means you were able to build others.”

“No problem. We took the engine apart. We charted it, we measured its components, we photographed it. We have it down on tape to the last millimeter of it. We can build hundreds of them, but there is one thing—”

“Yes?”

“We don’t know what makes it work. We missed the principle.”

“Leonard?”

“Leonard’s dead. Has been for years. Committed suicide. I don’t think even if he’d lived—”

“There’s something else,” I said. “You wouldn’t have dared to tinker with the engine if you hadn’t had a way to damp the time effect. Old Prather and the three of us kicked that one around—”

“Intelligence,” said Kirby.

“What do you mean—intelligence?”

“You remember that night we talked. I told you I was building—”

“An intelligent machine!” I shouted. “You mean to tell me?”

“Yes, I mean to tell you. An intelligent machine. I almost had it that night I talked with you.”

“Mary was on the right track, then,” I said. “That night at dinner she said ‘thought.’ Telepathic thought aimed at the engine. You see, it had to be some immaterial thing. We beat our brains out and could come up with nothing. But we knew we had to have a damper.”

I sat silently, trying to get it all straight in my mind.

“The government suspects,” I said, “where you got the engine. There was that crashed spaceship.”

“There was a spaceship,” said Kirby. “They finally got enough of it to guess how it was built. Picked up some organic matter, too, but not enough to get a good idea of its passengers. They suspect, of course, that we got the engine, although they aren’t even sure there was an engine. We’ve never admitted we found anything at all. Our story is we invented it.”

“They must have known, even from the first, something funny was going on,” I pointed out. “Mary and I disappeared. That would have taken some explanation. Not myself, of course, but Mary was something of a celebrity.”

“I’m a bit ashamed to tell you this,” said Kirby, and he did look a bit ashamed. “We didn’t actually say so, but we made it seem that the two of you had run off together.”

“Mary wouldn’t have thanked you for that,” I told him.

“After all,” he said, defensively, “the two of you had some dates while you were students.”

“There’s one thing you’ve not been telling me,” I said. “You said Mary went into the past. How do you know that?”

He didn’t answer for a while, and then he finally asked a question. “You remember that night we talked out on the hill?”

I nodded. “We talked about your intelligent machine.”

“More than that. I told you there never was a man named Cramden, that the endowment money came from someone else but was credited to a non-existent Cramden.”

“So what does that have to do with it?”

“It was something that Old Prather remembered. He told me about the argument you had about the drawing of the straws or paper slips out of a hat or something of the sort. Leonard wanted none of it. Shutting off the engine the way you did it, he said, was a gamble. And Mary said sure it was a gamble and that she was willing to gamble.”

He stopped and looked at me. I shook my head. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Is all this supposed to have some meaning?”

“Well, it turned out later that she was a gambler—a most accomplished gambler. She’d racked up half a fortune in the stock market. No one knew too much about it until later. She did it rather quietly.”

“Wait a second, there,” I said. “She was interested in economics. She took some courses and did a lot of reading. Economics and music. I’ve always wondered why she was ever chosen for the institute—”

“Precisely,” he said. “Many times, in the dead of night, I’ve wondered that myself, and each time I have been somewhat frightened at how it all turned out. Can you imagine the sort of killing that someone like Mary, with her kind of background, could make if they were thrown a hundred years into the past? They’d know the pattern. They’d know what to buy, when to get in, when to get out. Not specifically, of course, but from their knowledge of history.”

“Are you just guessing or do you have some facts?”

“Some facts,” he said. “Not too many. A few. Enough for an educated guess.”