Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

“There was one machine that worked,” Riggs put in. “It got rid of memories. I don’t understand exactly how it worked, but it did the job all right. It did too good a job. It swept the mind as clean as an empty room. It didn’t leave a thing. It took all memories and it left no capacity to build a new set. A man went in a human being and came out a vegetable.”

“Suspended animation,” said Stanford, “would be a solution. If we had suspended animation. Simply stack a man away until we found the answer, then revive and recondition him.”

“Be that as it may,” Young told them, “I should like your most earnest consideration of my petition. I do not feel quite equal to waiting until you have the answer solved.”

Riggs said, harshly, “You are asking us to legalize death.”

Young nodded. “If you wish to phrase it that way. I’m asking it in the name of common decency.”

Commissioner Stanford said, “We can ill afford to lose you, Ancestor.”

Young sighed. “There is that damned attitude again. Immortality pays all debts. When a man is made immortal, he has received full compensation for everything that he may endure. I have lived longer than any man could be expected to live and still I am denied the dignity of old age. A man’s desires are few, and quickly sated, and yet he is expected to continue living with desires burned up and blown away to ash. He gets to a point where nothing has a value … even to a point where his own personal values are no more than shadows. Gentlemen, there was a time when I could not have committed murder … literally could not have forced myself to kill another man … but today I could, without a second thought. Disillusion and cynicism have crept in upon me and I have no conscience.”

“There are compensations,” Riggs said. “Your family …”

“They get in my hair,” said Young disgustedly. “Thousands upon thousands of young squirts calling me Grandsire and Ancestor and coming to me for advice they practically never follow. I don’t know even a fraction of them and I listen to them carefully explain a relationship so tangled and trivial that it makes me yawn in their faces. It’s all new to them and so old, so damned and damnably old to me.”

“Ancestor Young,” said Stanford, “you have seen Man spread out from Earth to distant stellar systems. You have seen the human race expand from one planet to several thousand planets. You have had a part in this. Is there not some satisfaction …”

“You’re talking in abstracts,” Young cut in. “What I am concerned about is myself … a certain specific mass of protoplasm shaped in biped form and tagged by the designation, ironic as it may seem, of Andrew Young. I have been unselfish all my life. I’ve asked little for myself. Now I am being utterly and entirely selfish and I ask that this matter be regarded as a personal problem rather than as a racial abstraction.”

“Whether you’ll admit it or not,” said Stanford, “it is more than a personal problem. It is a problem which some day must be solved for the salvation of the race.”

“That is what I am trying to impress upon you,” Young snapped. “It is a problem that you must face. Some day you will solve it, but until you do, you must make provisions for those who face the unsolved problem.”

“Wait a while,” counseled Chairman Riggs. “Who knows? Today, tomorrow.”

“Or a million years from now,” Young told him bitterly and left, a tall, vigorous-looking man whose step was swift in anger where normally it was slow with weariness and despair.

There was yet a chance, of course.

But there was little hope.

How can a man go back almost six thousand years and snare a thing he never understood?

And yet Andrew Young remembered it. Remembered it as clearly as if it had been a thing that had happened in the morning of this very day.

It was a shining thing, a bright thing, a happiness that was brand-new and fresh as a bluebird’s wing of an April morning or a shy woods flower after sudden rain.

He had been a boy and he had seen the bluebird and he had no words to say the thing he felt, but he had held up his tiny fingers and pointed and shaped his lips to coo.

Once, he thought, I had it in my very fingers and I did not have the experience to know what it was, nor the value of it. And now I know the value, but it has escaped me—it escaped me on the day that I began to think like a human being. The first adult thought pushed it just a little and the next one pushed it farther and finally it was gone entirely and I didn’t even know that it had gone.

He sat on the chair on the flagstone patio and felt the Sun upon him, filtering through the branches of trees misty with the breaking leaves of Spring.

Something else, thought Andrew Young. Something that was not human—yet. A tiny animal that had many ways to choose, many roads to walk. And, of course, I chose the wrong way. I chose the human way. But there was another way. I know there must have been. A fairy way—or a brownie way, or maybe even pixie. That sounds foolish and childish now, but it wasn’t always.

I chose the human way because I was guided into it. I was pushed and shoved, like a herded sheep.

I grew up and I lost the thing I held.

He sat and made his mind go hard and tried to analyze what it was he sought and there was no name for it. Except happiness. And happiness was a state of being, not a thing to retain and grasp.

But he could remember how it felt. With his eyes open in the present, he could remember the brightness of the day of the past, the clean-washed goodness of it, the wonder of the colors that were more brilliant than he ever since had seen—as if it were the first second after Creation and the world was still shiningly new.

It was that new, of course. It would be that new to a child.

But that didn’t explain it all.

It didn’t explain the bottomless capacity for seeing and knowing and believing in the beauty and the goodness of a clean new world. It didn’t explain the almost non-human elation of knowing that there were colors to see and scents to smell and soft green grass to touch.

I’m insane, Andrew Young said to himself. Insane, or going insane. But if insanity will take me back to an understanding of the strange perception I had when I was a child, and lost, I’ll take insanity.

He leaned back in his chair and let his eyes go shut and his mind drift back.

He was crouching in a corner of a garden and the leaves were drifting down from the walnut trees like a rain of saffron gold. He lifted one of the leaves and it slipped from his fingers, for his hands were chubby still and not too sure in grasping. But he tried again and he clutched it by the stem in one stubby fist and he saw that it was not just a blob of yellowness, but delicate, with many little veins. When he held it so that the Sun struck it, he imagined that he could almost see through it, the gold was spun so fine.

He crouched with the leaf clutched tightly in his hand and for a moment there was a silence that held him motionless. Then he heard the frost-loosened leaves pattering all around him, pattering as they fell, talking in little whispers as they sailed down through the air and found themselves a bed with their golden fellows.

In that moment he knew that he was one with the leaves and the whispers that they made, one with the gold and the autumn sunshine and the far blue mist upon the hill above the apple orchard.

A foot crunched stone behind him and his eyes came open and the golden leaves were gone.

“I am sorry if I disturbed you, Ancestor,” said the man. “I had an appointment for this hour, but I would not have disturbed you if I had known.”

Young stared at him reproachfully without answering.