Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

She led the way slowly along the ditch and off into the marsh, following a watery runway that ran through the thick cover of sedges and rushes. “You know where you are going?”

“Just follow me,” she told him.

He wondered vaguely how many others might have followed this hidden path across the marsh—how many times she herself might have followed it. Although it was hard to think of her as she was now, dirty with muck and slime, wading through the water. Behind them they still could hear the shouts of the squad of goons that had been stationed at the block.

The goons had gone all out, he thought, setting up a block on a public highway. Someone could get into a lot of trouble for a stunt like that.

He’d told Lucinda that the goons would never dream of his going back to Center. But he had been wrong; apparently they had expected he’d try to make it back to Center. And they’d been set and waiting for him. Why?

Lucinda had halted in front of the mouth of a three-foot drain pipe, emerging from the bank just above the waterway. A tiny trickle of water ran out of it and dripped into the swamp. “How are you at crawling?”

“I can do anything,” he told her.

“It’s a long ways.”

He glanced up at the massive Center which, from where he stood, seemed to rise out of the marsh. “All the way?”

“All the way,” she said.

She lifted a muddy hand and brushed back a strand of hair, leaving a streak of mud across her face. He grinned at the sight of her—sodden and bedraggled, no longer the cool, unruffled creature who had sat across the desk from him. “If you laugh out loud,” she said, “I swear I’ll smack you one.”

She braced her elbows on the lip of the pipe and hauled herself upward, wriggling into the pipe. She gained the pipe and went forward on hands and knees.

Blaine followed. “You know your way around,” he whispered, the pipe catching up the whisper and magnifying it, bouncing it back and forth in an eerie echo.

“We had to, we fought a vicious enemy.”

They crawled and crept in silence, then, for what seemed half of eternity. “Here,” said Lucinda. “Careful.”

She reached back a hand and guided him forward in the darkness. A glow of feeble light came from a break in the side of the pipe, where a chunk of the tile had been broken or had fallen out. “Tight squeeze,” she told him.

He watched her wriggle through and drop from sight.

Blaine followed cautiously. A broken spear of the tile bit into his back and ripped his shirt, but he forced his body through and dropped.

They stood in a dim-lit corridor. The air smelled foul and old; the stones dripped with dampness. They came to stairs and climbed them, went along another corridor for a ways, then climbed again.

Then, suddenly, there were no dripping stones and dankness, but a familiar hall of marble, with the first-floor murals shining on the walls above the gleaming bronze of elevator doors.

There were robots in the hall; suddenly, the robots all were looking at them and starting to walk toward them.

Lucinda backed against the wall.

Blaine grabbed at her wrist.

“Quick,” he said. “Back the way …”

“Blaine,” said one of the advancing robots. “Wait a minute, Blaine.”

He swung around and waited. All the robots stopped. “We’ve been waiting for you,” said the robot spokesman. “We were sure you’d make it.”

Blaine jerked at Lucinda’s wrist. “Wait,” she whispered. “There’s something going on here.”

“Roemer said you would come back,” the robot said. “He said that you would try.”

“Roemer? What has Roemer got to do with it?”

“We are with you,” said the robot. “We threw out all the goons. Please allow me, sir.”

The doors of the nearest elevator were slowly sliding back.

“Let’s go along,” Lucinda said. “It sounds all right to me.”

They stepped into the elevator, with the robot spokesman following.

The car shot up and stopped. The door opened and they stepped out, between two solid lines of robots, flanking their path from the elevator to the door marked Records.

A man stood in the door, a great foursquare, dark-haired man whom Norman Blaine had seen before on a few occasions. A man who had written: If you should want to see me later, I am at your service .

“I heard about it, Blaine,” said Roemer. “I hoped you’d try to make it back; I figured you were that kind of man.”

Blaine stared back at him haggardly. “I’m glad you think so, Roemer. Five minutes from now …”

“It had to be someone,” said Roemer. “Don’t think about it too much. It simply had to come.”

Blaine walked on leaden feet between the file of robots, brushed past Roemer at the door.

The phone was on the desk and Norman Blaine lowered himself into the chair before it. Slowly he reached out his hand.

No! No! There must be another way. There must be another, better way to beat them—Harriet with her story; and the goons who were hunting him; and the plot with its roots reaching back through seven hundred years. Now he could make it stick—with Roemer and the robots he could make it stick. When he’d first thought of it, he had not been sure he could. His only thought then, he remembered, had been to get back to Center somehow, to get into this office and try to hold the place long enough, so he could not be stopped from doing what he meant to do.

He had expected to die here, behind some desk or chair, with a goon bullet in his body, and a shattered door through which the goons had finally burst their way.

There had to be another way—but there was no other way. There was only one way—the bitter fruit of seven hundred years of sitting quietly in the corner, with hands folded in one’s lap, and poison in one’s brain. He lifted the receiver out of the cradle and held it there, looking across the desk at Roemer.

“How did you do it?” he asked. “These robots? Why did you do it, John?”

“Giesey’s dead,” said Roemer; “so is Farris. No one has been appointed to their posts. Chain of command, my friend. Business agent, Protection, Records—you’re the big boss now; you’ve been the head of Dreams since the moment Farris died.”

“Oh, my God,” said Blaine.

“The robots are loyal,” Roemer went on. “Not to any man; not to any one department. They are conditioned to be loyal to Dreams. And you, my friend, are Dreams. For how long, I don’t know; but at the moment you are Dreams.”

They stared at one another for a long moment.

“The authority is yours,” said Roemer; “go ahead and make your call.”

So that was why, Blaine thought, the goons assumed I would return. That was why they’d set up the road block, not on one road only, perhaps, but on all of them—so that he could not get back and take over before someone could be named.

I should have thought of it, he told himself. I knew it. I thought of it this very afternoon, how I was third in line—

The operator was saying: “Number, please. Number, please. What number do you wish, please.”

Blaine gave the number and waited.

Lucinda had laughed at him and said: “You are a dedicated man.” Perhaps not those words exactly but that had been what she meant. Mocking him with his dedication; prodding him to see what he would do. A dedicated man, she’d said. And now, here finally, was the price of dedication.

“News” said a voice. “This is Central News.”

“I have a story for you.”

“Who is speaking, please?”

“Norman Blaine. I am Blaine, of Dreams.”

“Blaine?” A pause. “You said your name was Blaine?”

“That’s right.”