Clifford Simak - The Thing in the Stone - And Other Stories

He did not hurry. He strolled along sedately. He must be getting close to home and when he got there and had to leave it, he’d miss this country lane. He considered stopping for a while to sit upon one of the crumbling walls and listen to the meadow larks and watch the cloud patterns in the deep blue sky, but today he had no time to sit—today was a busy day.

Up ahead of him he saw the signpost that would have his name upon it and that was as far as he would go, for it marked the door of home. Someone else traveling this lane homeward would see another signpost, but no one else would see it, as no one else would see the one meant for his eyes alone.

He slackened his pace, loitering, reluctant to leave the road he traveled. But slow as he might go, he finally reached the signpost and turned off into the little footpath.

A door opened before him and beyond the door was home.

“Good afternoon, sir,” said the cyber, Harley. “I hope you had a pleasant walk. Did you get the tobacco?”

“Very pleasant, Harley, thank you.”

“And now …” said Harley.

“No,” said Harrison. “Absolutely not. No drink, no conversation. Forget your role of the gracious servant. I have work to do.”

“But, sir …”

“And no ski slope, no fishing stream, no beach, no nothing. Just leave me alone.”

“If you wish it, sir,” said Harley, considerably offended, “I’ll leave you quite alone.”

“Some other time,” said Harrison, “I’ll be quite grateful for your services.”

“I am always at your service, sir.”

“Where are the others?”

“You have forgotten, sir. They went out to the country.”

“Yes,” he said. “I had forgotten.”

He walked from the entry into the living room and, for the first time in many months, realized, with something of a shock, how small the living quarters were.

“There is no need of size,” said Harley. “No need of space.”

“That’s right,” said Harrison, “and even if we needed it, or wanted it, we haven’t got the space. And I wish, if it is all the same to you, you’d cut out monitoring me.”

“I must monitor you,” said Harley, primly. “That is my job and as a functioning, conscientious cybernetic system, I must do my job. For if I did not monitor you, then how might I best serve you?”

“All right, monitor,” said Harrison, “but keep it to yourself. Can’t you, for the next few hours, manage to be somewhat unobtrusive.”

“I would suspect,” said Harley, “that there must be something wrong with you, but my medical components come up with nothing more than normal and from that I must conclude that you have no illness. But I must confess to being puzzled. You have never been quite this way before. You reject me and my service and I am disturbed.”

“I am sorry, Harley. I have something to decide.”

He walked to the window and looked out. The country stretched away, far below—a bit more, he remembered now, than a mile below. A great belt of parkland lay around the tower and beyond the parkland wilderness—recreational space for all who wished to use it. For the land was no longer used, or very little used. A few mines, a few tracts of carefully harvested timber and that was all. After all of this was over, he decided, he and Mary would go west to the mountains, for a holiday.

“Why go?” asked Harley. “I can send you there, or to a place that is equivalent to mountains. It would be the same. You would not know the difference.”

“I thought I told you to shut up.”

“I am sorry, sir. It is just that my only thought is of your welfare.”

“That,” said Harrison, “is most commendable of you.”

“I am glad you think so, sir.”

Harrison turned from the window and went into his workroom. The room was small and crammed with equipment and a desk. The windowless walls closed in on him, but he felt comfortable. Here was his work and life.

Here, for years, he had worked. And was his work now coming to an end? Was that the reason, he asked himself, that he had delayed so long, to hold onto work and purpose until the very end? But he was not, he knew, being honest with himself; it was because he must be certain and on that trip down to the retail levels to buy himself a tin of tobacco, it had come to him that he was as certain now as he would ever be.

He grinned, remembering that trip—a hookey trip. There had been no need to go. He could have simply dialed his purchase and a moment later picked it out of the delivery chute. A man, at times, he told himself, will practice self-deceit. If he had wanted to take a walk, there would have been nothing in the world to prevent his taking it. If he had wanted to get away from these small, cramped rooms and Harley, there would have been nothing that could stop him. There had been no need to concoct an excuse to do so.

“I must remind you, sir,” said Harley, “that there is never any reason for you to remain in what you think of as these small, cramped rooms. If you would but allow me, sir, I could place you on a lonely mountaintop, all alone upon it, with all the world to see and no one else about, with as much space and freedom as any man might wish. It is because of such as I that humans require little living space. Granted, without the cybers these kind of quarters would be intolerable, but you need not live within them, no need to live within them, for the entire world and more is yours. Anything that a cyber can dream is yours and I really do believe …”

“Cut it out,” said Harrison, sharply. “Another word from you and I’ll phone replacement. Perhaps you have been too long in operation and …”

“I’ll be silent, sir,” said Harley. “You have my promise on it.”

“See you do,” said Harrison.

He sat easy in the chair behind his desk and the questions hammered at him: Could he be entirely certain? Had he overlooked some factor that should be considered? Had he carried his simulations into the future as deeply as he should? There was no doubt at all that the process would work. He had checked the process and the theory step by step, not once, but many times, and there was no question that the procedure and the theory were correct. Now it was no longer a matter of procedure, but a matter of effect. Could he be certain that he could chart the future course of mankind, with this new factor introduced, with enough precision to be sure that it would not produce social aberrations that might not be evident for centuries?

Future history, he reminded himself, could be changed by such unlikely items that one could take no chance at all.

Take the present world, he thought, take the mile-high cities and all the vacant acres, and one could trace it back to so short a time as two centuries before. A man could put his finger on the time when it began, marking the break with a cultural pattern that man had laboriously put together in five millennia of effort. Two hundred years ago man had lived in noisome cities that had stretched across mile on mile of land; today he lived in towers that scraped the very sky. Now, instead of industrial centers and power plants belching smoke and gobbling up the dwindling resources of the earth, man got his energy from fusion and needed only a fraction of the power he had needed then because he did with very little.

There had been no need, he told himself, for the change to have been as great as it had been; there had been those, history reminded one, who had thought of it all as madness. The idea had been carried farther than there was any need by the great revulsion that had risen at the olden way of life and this revulsion, a madness in itself, had swept all mankind beyond the point of common sense. And yet, perhaps, he thought, it was just as well, for because of it man had, in many ways, a better life and a cleaner planet.