Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

Stanford started to speak, then hesitated, as if seeking in his mind for the proper words.

“Yes,” said Riggs. “What is it?”

“Later on,” Stanford managed to say, “much later on, toward the very end, there is a certain factor that we must supply. The one thing that he will need the most and the one thing that he cannot think about, even in advance. All the rest can be stage setting and he can still go on toward the time when it becomes reality. All the rest may be make-believe, but one thing must come as genuine or the entire effort will collapse in failure.”

Riggs nodded. “Of course. That’s something we’ll have to work out carefully.”

“If we can,” Stanford said.

The yellow button over here and the red one over there and the green one doesn’t fit, so I’ll throw it on the floor and just for the fun of it, I’ll put the pink one in my mouth and someone will find me with it and they’ll raise a ruckus because they will be afraid that I will swallow it.

And there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that I love better than a full-blown ruckus. Especially if it is over me.

“Ug,” said Andrew Young, and he swallowed the button.

He sat stiff and straight in the towering high chair and then, in a fury, swept the oversized muffin tin and its freight of buttons crashing to the floor.

For a second he felt like weeping in utter frustration and then a sense of shame crept in on him.

Big baby, he said to himself.

Crazy to be sitting in an overgrown high chair, playing with buttons and mouthing baby talk and trying to force a mind conditioned by five thousand years of life into the channels of an infant’s thoughts.

Carefully he disengaged the tray and slid it out, cautiously shinnied down the twelve-foot-high chair.

The room engulfed him, the ceiling towering far above him.

The neighbors, he told himself, no doubt thought him crazy, although none of them had said so. Come to think of it, he had not seen any of his neighbors for a long spell now.

A suspicion came into his mind. Maybe they knew what he was doing, maybe they were deliberately keeping out of his way in order not to embarrass him.

That, of course, would be what they would do if they had realized what he was about. But he had expected … he had expected … that fellow, what’s his name? … at the commission, what’s the name of that commission, anyhow? Well, anyway, he’d expected a fellow whose name he couldn’t remember from a commission the name of which he could not recall to come snooping around, wondering what he might be up to, offering to help, spoiling the whole setup, everything he’d planned.

I can’t remember, he complained to himself. I can’t remember the name of a man whose name I knew so short a time ago as yesterday. Nor the name of a commission that I knew as well as I know my name. I’m getting forgetful. I’m getting downright childish.

Childish?

Childish!

Childish and forgetful.

Good Lord, thought Andrew Young, that’s just the way I want it.

On hands and knees he scrabbled about and picked up the buttons, put them in his pocket. Then, with the muffin tin underneath his arm, he shinnied up the high chair and, seating himself comfortably, sorted out the buttons in the pan.

The green one over here in this compartment and the yellow one … oops, there she goes onto the floor. And the red one in with the blue one and this one … this one … what’s the color of this one? Color? What’s that?

What is what?

What—

“It’s almost time,” said Stanford, “and we are ready, as ready as we’ll ever be. We’ll move in when the time is right, but we can’t move in too soon. Better to be a little late than a little early. We have all the things we need. Special size diapers and—”

“Good Lord,” exclaimed Riggs, “it won’t go that far, will it?”

“It should,” said Stanford. “It should go even further to work right. He got lost yesterday. One of our men found him and led him home. He didn’t have the slightest idea where he was and he was getting pretty scared and he cried a little. He chattered about birds and flowers and he insisted that our man stay and play with him.”

Riggs chuckled softly. “Did he?”

“Oh, certainly. He came back worn to a frazzle.”

“Food?” asked Riggs. “How is he feeding himself?”

“We see that there’s a supply of stuff, cookies and such-wise, left on a low shelf, where he can get at them. One of the robots cooks up some more substantial stuff on a regular schedule and leaves it where he can find it. We have to be careful. We can’t mess around too much. We can’t intrude on him. I have a feeling he’s almost reached an actual turning point. We can’t afford to upset things now that he’s come this far.”

“The android’s ready?”

“Just about,” said Stanford.

“And the playmates?”

“Ready. They were less of a problem.”

“There’s nothing more that we can do?”

“Nothing,” Stanford said. “Just wait, that’s all. Young has carried himself this far by the sheer force of will alone. That will is gone now. He can’t consciously force himself any further back. He is more child than adult now. He’s built up a regressive momentum and the only question is whether that momentum is sufficient to carry him all the way back to actual babyhood.”

“It has to go back to that?” Riggs looked unhappy, obviously thinking of his own future. “You’re only guessing, aren’t you?”

“All the way or it simply is no good,” Stanford said dogmatically. “He has to get an absolutely fresh start. All the way or nothing.”

“And if he gets stuck halfway between? Half child, half man, what then?”

“That’s something I don’t want to think about,” Stanford said.

He had lost his favorite teddy bear and gone to hunt it in the dusk that was filled with elusive fireflies and the hush of a world quieting down for the time of sleep. The grass was drenched with dew and he felt the cold wetness of it soaking through his shoes as he went from bush to hedge to flowerbed, looking for the missing toy.

It was necessary, he told himself, that he find the nice little bear, for it was the one that slept with him and if he did not find it, he knew that it would spend a lonely and comfortless night. But at no time did he admit, even to his innermost thought, that it was he who needed the bear and not the bear who needed him.

A soaring bat swooped low and for a terrified moment, catching sight of the zooming terror, a blob of darkness in the gathering dusk, he squatted low against the ground, huddling against the sudden fear that came out of the night. Sounds of fright bubbled in his throat and now he saw the great dark garden as an unknown place, filled with lurking shadows that lay in wait for him.

He stayed cowering against the ground and tried to fight off the alien fear that growled from behind each bush and snarled in every darkened corner. But even as the fear washed over him, there was one hidden corner of his mind that knew there was no need of fear. It was as if that one area of his brain still fought against the rest of him, as if that small section of cells might know that the bat was no more than a flying bat, that the shadows in the garden were no more than absence of light.

There was a reason, he knew, why he should not be afraid—a good reason born of a certain knowledge he no longer had. And that he should have such knowledge seemed unbelievable, for he was scarcely two years old.

He tried to say it—two years old.

There was something wrong with his tongue, something the matter with the way he had to use his mouth, with the way his lips refused to shape the words he meant to say.