Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

“Not a chance; you are one of us. You can’t get out of it. If you say a word, you wreck the guild—and you won’t have a chance to say a word. From this moment, Blaine, there’s a gun against your back; there’ll be someone watching all the time.

“Don’t try to do it, Blaine; I like you. I like the way you operate. That Education angle is pure genius. You play along with us, and it’ll be worth your while. There’s nothing you can do but play along with us; you’re in it, clear up to your chin. As the head of Records, you have custody of all the evidence, and you can’t write off that fact … Go on, man; finish up that drink.”

“I’d forgotten it,” said Blaine.

He flicked the glass and the liquor splashed out, into Farris’ face. As if it were the same motion, Blaine’s fingers left the glass, let it drop, and reached for the liquor bottle.

Paul Farris came to his feet, blinded, hands clawing at his face. Blaine rose with him, bottle arcing, and his aim was good. The bottle crashed on the goon leader’s skull and the man went down upon the carpeting, with snakes of blood oozing through his hair.

For a second Norman Blaine stood there. The room and the man upon the floor suddenly were bright and sharp, each feature of the place and the shape upon the carpeting burning themselves into his consciousness. He lifted his hand and saw that he still grasped the bottle’s neck with its jagged, broken edges. He hurled it from him and ran, hunched against the expected bullet, straight toward the window. He leaped and rolled himself into a ball even as he leaped, arms wrapped around his face. He crashed into the glass, heard the faint ping of its explosion, and then was through and falling.

He lit on the gravel path and rolled until thick shrubbery stopped him, then crawled swiftly toward the wall. But the wall was smooth, he remembered—not one to be climbed. Smooth and high and with only one gate. They would hunt him down and kill him. They’d shake him out like a rabbit in a brushpile. He didn’t have a chance.

He didn’t have a gun and he’d not been trained to fight. All that he could do was hide and run; even so, he couldn’t get away, for there wasn’t much to hide in and there wasn’t far to run. But I’m glad I did it, he told himself .

It was a blow against the shame of seven hundred years, a re-assertion of the old, dead dedication. The blow should have been struck long ago; it was useless now, except as a symbol that only Norman Blaine would know.

He wondered how much such symbolism might count in this world around him.

Blaine heard them running now, and shouting; he knew it would not be long. He huddled in the bushes and tried to plan what he should do, but everywhere he ran into blank walls and there was nothing he could do.

A voice hissed at him, a whisper from the wall. Blaine started, pressing himself further back into the clump of bushes.

“Psst, “ said the voice once again.

A trick, he thought, wildly. A trick to lure me out. Then he saw the rope, dangling from the wall, where it was lighted by the broken window.

“Psst,” said the voice.

Blaine took the chance. He leaped from the bushes and across the path toward the wall. The rope was real and was anchored. Spurred by desperation, Blaine went up it like a monkey, flung out an arm across the top of the wall and hauled himself upward. A gun cracked angrily; a bullet hit the wall and ricocheted, wailing, out into the night.

Without thinking of the danger, he hurled himself off the wall. He struck hard ground that drove the breath from him and he doubled up with agony, retching, gasping to regain his breath, while stars wheeled with tortuous deliberation in the center of his brain.

He felt hands lifting him and carrying him and heard the slamming of a door, then the flow of speed as a car howled through the night.

A face was talking to him and Norman Blaine tried to place it; he knew that he’d seen it once before. But he couldn’t recognize it; he shut his eyes, tried to find soft, cool blackness. The blackness was not soft, but harsh and painful; he opened his eyes again.

The face still was talking to him and it had shoved itself up close to him. He felt the fine spray of the other’s saliva fly against his face. Once before, when a man had talked to Blaine, this had happened. That morning at the parking lot a man had buttonholed him. And here he was again, with his face thrust close and the words pouring out of him.

“Cut it out, Joe,” said another voice. “He’s still half out. You hit him too hard; he can’t understand you.”

And Blaine knew that voice too. He put out his hand, pushed the face away, and hauled himself to a sitting position, with a rough wall against his back.

“Hello, Collins,” he said to the second voice. “How did you get here?”

“I was brought,” said Collins.

“So I heard.”

Blaine wondered where he was: An old cellar, apparently—a fit place for conspirators. “Friends of yours?” he asked.

“It turns out that they are.”

The face of the Buttonholer popped up once again.

“Keep him away from me,” said Blaine.

Another voice told Joe to get away. And he knew that voice, too.

Joe’s face left.

Blaine put up his arm and wiped his own face. “Next,” he said, “I’ll find Farris here.”

“Farris is dead,” said Collins.

“I didn’t think you had the guts,” said Lucinda Silone.

He turned his head against the roughness of the wall and he saw them now, standing to one side of him—Collins and Lucinda and Joe and two others that he did not know.

“He won’t laugh again,” said Blaine. “I smashed the laugh off him.”

“Dead men never laugh,” said Joe.

“I didn’t hit him very hard.”

“Hard enough.”

“How do you know?”

“We made sure,” said Lucinda.

He remembered her from the morning, sitting across the desk from him, and the calmness of her. She still was calm. She was one, Blaine thought, who could make sure—very sure—that a man was dead.

It would not have been too hard to do. Blaine had been seen going over the wall and there would have been a chase. While the guard poured out after him it would have been a fairly simple matter to slip into the house and make entirely certain that Farris was dead.

He reached up a hand and felt the lump on his head, back of the ear. They had made certain of him, too, he thought—certain that he would not wake too soon and that he’d make no trouble. He stumbled to his feet and stood shakily, putting out a hand against the wall to support himself.

He looked at Lucinda. “Education,” he said, and he looked at Collins and said, “You too.”

And he looked at the rest of them, from one to another. “And you?” he asked. “Every one of you?”

“Education has known It for a long time,” Lucinda told him. “For a century or more. We’ve been working on you; and this time, my friend, we have Dreams nailed down.”

“A conspiracy,” said Blaine, grim laughter in his throat. “A wonderful combination—Education and conspiracy. And the Buttonholers. Oh, God, don’t tell me the Buttonholers! “

She held her chin just a little tilted and her shoulders were straight. “Yes, the Buttonholers, too.”

“Now,” Blaine told her, “I’ve heard everything.” He flicked a questioning thumb at Collins.

“A man,” said the girl, “who took a Dream before we ever knew; who took you at the outward value that you give yourselves. We got to him …”

“Got to him!”

“Certainly. You don’t think that we’re without—well, you might call them representatives, at Center.”