Clifford Simak - No Life of Their Own And Other Stories

“That was a social error,” Webster told him. “Ministers don’t drink.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know. He asked me to ask you to come to church sometime.”

“Eh?”

“I told him, sir, that you never went anywhere.”

“That was quite right, Jenkins,” said Webster. “None of us ever go anywhere.”

Jenkins headed for the door, stopped before he got there, turned around. “If I may say so, sir, that was a touching service at the crypt. Your father was a fine human, the finest ever was. The robots were saying the service was very fitting. Dignified like, sir. He would have liked it had he known.”

“My father,” said Webster, “would be even more pleased to hear you say that, Jenkins.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jenkins, and went out.

Webster sat with the whiskey and the book and fire—felt the comfort of the well-known room close in about him, felt the refuge that was in it.

This was home. It had been home for the Websters since that day when the first John J. had come here and built the first unit of the sprawling house. John J. had chosen it because it had a trout stream, or so he always said. But it was something more than that. It must have been, Webster told himself, something more than that.

Or perhaps, at first, it had only been the trout stream. The trout stream and the trees and meadows, the rocky ridge where the mist drifted in each morning from the river. Maybe the rest of it had grown, grown gradually through the years, through years of family association until the very soil was soaked with something that approached, but wasn’t quite, tradition. Something that made each tree, each rock, each foot of soil a Webster tree or rock or piece of soil. It all belonged.

John J., the first John J., had come after the breakup of the cities, after men had forsaken, once and for all, the twentieth century huddling places, had broken free of the tribal instinct to stick together in one cave or in one clearing against a common foe or a common fear. An instinct that had become outmoded, for there were no fears or foes. Man revolting against the herd instinct economic and social conditions had impressed upon him in ages past. A new security and a new sufficiency had made it possible to break away.

The trend had started back in the twentieth century, more than two hundred years before, when men moved to country homes to get fresh air and elbow room and a graciousness in life that communal existence, in its strictest sense, never had given them.

And here was the end result. A quiet living. A peace that could only come with good things. The sort of life that men had yearned for years to have. A manorial existence, based on old family homes and leisurely acres, with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs.

Webster smiled at the fireplace with its blazing wood. That was an anachronism, but a good one—something that Man had brought forward from the caves. Useless, because atomic heating was better—but more pleasant. One couldn’t sit and watch atomics and dream and build castles in the flames.

Even the crypt out there, where they had put his father that afternoon. That was family, too. All of a piece with the rest of it. The somber pride and leisured life and peace. In the old days the dead were buried in vast plots all together, stranger cheek by jowl with stranger—

He never goes anywhere.

That is what Jenkins had told the minister.

And that was right. For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend the theater or hear a concert or browse in a library halfway around the world. Could transact any business one might need to transact without rising from one’s chair.

Webster reached out his hand and drank the whiskey, then swung to the dialed machine beside his desk.

He spun dials from memory without resorting to the log. He knew where he was going.

His finger flipped a toggle and the room melted away—or seemed to melt. There was left the chair within which he sat, part of the desk, part of the machine itself and that was all.

The chair was on a hillside swept with golden grass and dotted with scraggly, wind-twisted trees, a hillside that straggled down to a lake nestling in the grip of purple mountain spurs. The spurs, darkened in long streaks with the bluish-green of distant pine, climbed in staggering stairs, melting into the blue-tinged snow-capped peaks that reared beyond and above them in jagged saw-toothed outline.

The wind talked harshly in the crouching trees and ripped the long grass in sudden gusts. The last rays of the sun struck fire from the distant peaks.

Solitude and grandeur, the long sweep of tumbled land, the cuddled lake, the knifelike shadows on the far-off ranges.

Webster sat easily in his chair, eyes squinting at the peaks.

A voice said almost at his shoulder: “May I come in?”

A soft, sibilant voice, wholly unhuman. But one that Webster knew.

He nodded his head. “By all means, Juwain.”

He turned slightly and saw the elaborate crouching pedestal, the furry, soft-eyed figure of the Martian squatting on it. Other alien furniture loomed indistinctly beyond the pedestal, half guessed furniture from that dwelling out on Mars.

The Martian flipped a furry hand toward the mountain range.

“You love this,” he said. “You can understand it. And I can understand how you understand it, but to me there is more terror than beauty in it. It is something we could never have on Mars.”

Webster reached out a hand, but the Martian stopped him.

“Leave it on,” he said. “I know why you came here. I would not have come at a time like this except I thought perhaps an old friend—”

“It is kind of you,” said Webster. “I am glad that you have come.”

“Your father,” said Juwain, “was a great man. I remember how you used to talk to me of him, those years you spent on Mars. You said then you would come back sometime. Why is it you’ve never come?”

“Why,” said Webster, “I just never—”

“Do not tell me,” said the Martian. “I already know.”

“My son,” said Webster, “is going to Mars in a few days. I shall have him call on you.”

“That would be a pleasure,” said Juwain. “I shall be expecting him.”

He stirred uneasily on the crouching pedestal. “Perhaps he carries on tradition.”

“No,” said Webster. “He is studying engineering. He never cared for surgery.”

“He has a right,” observed the Martian, “to follow the life that he has chosen. Still, one might be permitted to wish.”

“One could,” Webster agreed. “But that is over and done with. Perhaps he will be a great engineer. Space structure. Talks of ships out to the stars.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Juwain, “your family has done enough for medical science. You and your father—”

“And his father,” said Webster, “before him.”

“Your book,” declared Juwain, “has put Mars in debt to you. It may focus more attention on Martian specialization. My people do not make good doctors. They have no background for it. Queer how the minds of races run. Queer that Mars never thought of medicine—literally never thought of it. Replaced it with a cult of fatalism. While even in your early history, when men still lived in caves—”

“There are many things,” said Webster, “that you thought of and we didn’t. Things we wonder now how we ever missed. Abilities that you developed and we do not have. Take your own specialty, philosophy. But different than ours. A science, while ours never was more than fumbling. An orderly, logical development of philosophy, workable, practical, applicable, an actual tool.”