Clifford Simak - New Folks' Home - And Other Stories

If he did not think in entirely human channels, he also was not trammeled by the limitations of human thinking; he was free to let his mind wander out in strange directions and bend its energies to strange tasks. His obsession with the necessity of achieving lasting peace was an example of his unhuman attitude; for, while the entire Earth did earnest lip service to the cause of peace, the threat of war had hung over every one so long that its horror had been dulled. But to Cooper Jackson, it was unthinkable that men should slay one another by the millions.

Always Charley came back to those helpers, those three shadowy figures he pictured as standing at Cooper Jackson’s shoulder. He assigned them three arbitrary faces, but the faces would not stay as he imagined them. At last he understood that they were things to which you could assign no face.

But the thing that he still worried most about, although he tried not to think of it at all because of its enormity, was the Utah plane crash.

The plane had crashed before Cooper, or anyone else, could have known it was about to crash. Whatever had happened to the people in the plane had happened then, in that one split second when plane and peak had touched—had happened without benefit of the magic of Cooper Jackson’s wishful thinking. And to imagine that, without such benefit, the passengers and crew could have escaped unscathed was nothing short of madness. It just couldn’t have happened that way.

And that meant that Cooper not only could make something turn out the way he wanted it to turn out, but that he also could go back through time and undo something that was already done! Either that, or he could bring dead people back to life, reassembling their shattered bodies and making them whole again, and that was even madder than to think that his wishful thinking might be retroactive.

Whenever Charley thought about that, the sweat would start out on him and he’d think about Britain and Iran and once again he would see Cooper’s face, all puckered up with worry about what the world was coming to.

He watched the news more closely than he had ever watched it, analyzing each unexpected turn in it, searching for the clue that might suggest some harebrained scheme to Cooper Jackson, trying to think the way Cooper might think, but feeling fairly sure that he wasn’t even coming close.

He had his bags packed twice to go to Washington—but each time he unpacked them and put away his clothes and shoved the bags back into the closet.

For he realized there was no use going to Washington, or anywhere else for that matter.

“Mr. President, I know a man who can bring peace to the world …”

They’d throw him out before he had the sentence finished.

He called Doc Ames, and Doc told him that everything was all right, that Cooper had bought a lot of back-issue science fiction magazines and was going through them, cataloguing story themes and variant ideas. He seemed happy in this pastime and calmer than he’d been for weeks.

When Charley hung up, he found that his hands were shaking and he suddenly was cold all over, for he felt positive that he knew what Cooper was doing with those piles of magazines.

He sat in the one comfortable chair in his rented room and thought furiously, turning over and over the plots that he had run across in his science fiction reading. While there were some that might apply, he rejected them because they didn’t fit into the pattern of his fear.

It wasn’t until then that he realized he’d been so busy worrying about Cooper that he hadn’t been paying attention to the recent magazines. Cold fear gripped him that there might be something in the current issues that might apply most neatly.

He’d have to buy all the magazines he could find, and give them a good, fast check.

But he got busy at one thing and another and it was almost a week before he got around to buying them. By that time his fear had subsided to some extent. Trudging home with the magazines clutched beneath his arm, he decided that he would put aside his worry for one night at least and read for enjoyment.

That evening he settled himself in the comfortable chair and stacked the magazines beside him. He took the first one off the top of the stack and opened it, noting with some pleasure that the lead-off story was by a favorite author.

It was a grim affair about an Earthman holding an outpost against terrific odds. He read the next one … about a starship that hit a space warp and got hurled into another universe.

The third was about the Earth being threatened by a terrible war and how the hero solved the crisis by bringing about a condition which outlawed electricity, making it impossible in the Universe. Without electricity, planes couldn’t fly and tanks couldn’t move and guns couldn’t be sighted in, so there was no war.

Charley sat in the chair like a stricken man. The magazine dropped from his fingers to the floor and he stared across the room at the opposite wall with terror in his eyes, knowing that Cooper Jackson would have read that story, too.

After a while Charley got up and telephoned Doc.

“I’m worried, Charley,” Doc told him. “Coop has disappeared.”

“Disappeared!”

“We’ve tried to keep it quiet. Didn’t want to stir up any fuss—the way Coop is and all. There might be too many questions.”

“You’re looking for him?”

“We’re looking for him,” Doc said, “as quietly as we can. We have scoured the countryside and we’ve sent out wires to police officials and missing person bureaus.”

“You’ve got to find him, Doc!”

“We’re doing all we can.” Doc sounded tired and a bit bewildered.

“But where could he have gone?” asked Charley. “He doesn’t have any money, does he? He can’t stay hiding out too long without …”

“Coop can get money any time he wants it. He can get anything he wants any time he wants it.”

“I see what you mean,” said Charley.

“I’ll keep in touch,” said Doc.

“Is there anything …?”

“Not a thing,” said Doc. “Not a thing that anyone can do. We can wait. That’s all.”

That was months ago, and Charley is still waiting.

Cooper’s still missing and there’s no trace of him.

So Charley waits and worries.

And the thing he worries about is Cooper’s lack of a formal education, his utter lack of certain basic common knowledge.

There is one hope, of course—that Cooper, if and when he decides to act, will make his action retroactive, going back in time to outlaw not electricity itself, but Man’s discovery of electricity. For, disrupting and terrible as that might be, it would be better than the other way.

But Charley’s afraid that Cooper won’t see the necessity for retroactive action. He’s afraid that Cooper won’t realize that, when you outlaw electricity, you can’t limit it to the current that runs through a wire to light a lamp or turn an engine. When you rule out electricity as a natural phenomenon, you rule out all electricity, and that means you rule out an integral part of atomic structure. And that you affect not only this Earth but the entire Universe.

So Charley sits and worries and waits for the flicker of the lamp beside his chair.

Although he realizes, of course, that when it comes there won’t be any flicker.

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These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.