“We’re old fashioned,” said Elaine. “I have always felt that living in a place like this was akin—well, say, to taking up one’s residence in a sod shanty in the twentieth century.”
“Nevertheless,” said Blake, “it has a certain charm. And a sense of security and solidity.”
“You are right, it has,” said the senator. “Listen to that wind trying to get it. Listen to that rain.”
He swirled the brandy in his glass.
“It doesn’t fly, of course,” he said, “and it won’t talk to you. But who wants a house to fly and …”
“Daddy!” said Elaine.
“You must excuse me, sir,” said the senator. “I have my enthusiasms and I like to talk about them and sometimes I let them run away with me—and there are times, I would suspect, when I have bad manners. My daughter said something about seeing you on dimensino.”
“Of course, Daddy,” said Elaine. “You never pay attention. You’re so wrapped up in the bioengineering hearings that you don’t pay attention.”
“But, my dear,” said the senator, “the hearings are important. The human race must decide before too long what to do with all these planets we are finding. And I tell you that terraforming them is the solution of a lunatic. Think of all the time that it will take and the money that it will swallow up.”
“By the way,” said Elaine, “I forgot. Mother phoned. She won’t be home tonight. She heard about the storm and is staying in New York.”
The senator grunted. “Fine. Bad night for traveling. How was London? Did she say?”
“She enjoyed the performance.”
“Music hall,” the senator explained to Blake. “Revival of an ancient entertainment form. Very primitive, I understand. My wife is taken with it. She is an arty person.”
“What a horrible thing to say,” said Elaine.
“Not at all,” said the senator. “It’s the truth. But to get back to this business of bioengineering. Perhaps, Mr. Blake, you have some opinions.”
“No,” said Blake, “I can’t say that I have. I find myself somewhat out of touch.”
“Out of touch? Oh, yes, I suppose you would be. This business of the stars. I recall the story now. Encapsulated, as I remember it, and found by some asteroid miners. What system was it, now?”
“Out in the Antares neighborhood. A small star—just a number, not a name. But I remember none of that. They waited to revive me until I was brought to Washington.”
“And you remember nothing?”
“Not a thing,” said Blake. “My life began, so far as I’m concerned, less than a month ago. I don’t know who I am or …”
“But you have a name.”
“A mere convenience,” said Blake. “One that I picked out. John Smith would have done as well. It seems a man must have a name.”
“But, as I recall it, you had background knowledge.”
“Yes—and that is a strange thing. A knowledge of the earth and of its people and of its ways, but in many ways hopelessly outdated. I continually am astounded. I stumble into customs and beliefs and words that are unfamiliar to me.”
Elaine said, quietly, “You don’t need to talk about it. We hadn’t meant to pry.”
“I don’t mind,” Blake told her. “I’ve accepted the situation. It’s a strange position to be in, but some day I may know. It may come back to me—who I am and where I came from and when. And what happened out there. At the moment, as you may understand, I am considerably confused. Everyone, however, has been considerate. I was given a house to live in. And I’ve not been bothered. It’s in a little village.…”
“This village?” asked the senator. “Nearby, I presume.”
“I don’t actually know,” said Blake. “Something funny happened to me. I don’t know where I am. The village is called Middleton.”
“That’s just down the valley,” said the senator. “Not five miles from here. It would seem that we are neighbors.”
“I went out after dinner,” Blake told them. “I was on the patio, looking toward the mountains. A storm was coming up. Big black clouds and lightning, but still a good ways off. And then, suddenly, I was on the hill across the creek from this place and the rain was coming down and I was soaked …”
He stopped and set down his brandy glass, carefully, on the hearth. He stared from one to the other of them.
“That’s the way it was,” he said. “I know that it sounds wild.”
“It sounds impossible,” said the senator.
“I am sure it does,” said Blake. “And there was not only space, but time, as well, involved. Not only did I find myself some miles away from where I had been standing, but it was night and when I stepped out on the patio dusk had just begun to fall.”
“I am sorry,” said the senator, “that the stupid guard threw the light on you. Finding yourself here must have been shock enough. I don’t ask for guards. I don’t even want them. But Geneva insists that all senators must be guarded. I don’t know exactly why. There is no one, I am sure, thirsting for our blood. Finally, after many years, Earth is at least partway civilized.”
“There is this bioengineering business,” said Elaine. “Feelings do run high.”
“Nothing is involved,” said the senator, “except a determination of policy. There is no reason.…”
“But there is,” she said. “All the Bible Belt fanatics, all the arch conservatives, all the prissy conventionists are dead set against it.”
She turned toward Blake. “Wouldn’t you know,” she said, “that the senator, who lives in a house built three hundred years ago and brags about there being not a single gadget in it …”
“The chef,” said the senator. “You forget the chef.”
She ignored him. “And brags about not a single gadget in it, would align himself with the wild-eyed bunch, with the arch-progressives, with the far-out gang?”
The senator sputtered. “Not a thing far-out about it. It just makes common sense. It will cost trillions of dollars to terraform a single planet. At a cost much more reasonable, and in a fraction of the time required, we can engineer a human race that could live upon that planet. Instead of changing the planet to fit the man, we change the man to fit the planet.…”
“That’s exactly the point,” said Elaine. “That’s the point your opponents have been making. Change the man—that’s the thing that sticks fast inside their craws. When you got through, this thing that would live upon another planet would not be a man.”
“It might not look like one,” said the senator, “but it still would be a man.”
She said to Blake, “You understand, of course, that I’m not against the senator. But there are times when it’s terribly hard to make him realize what he’s up against.”
“My daughter,” said the senator, “plays my devil’s advocate and at times it is a service. But in this instance there is no particular need. I know the bitterness of the opposition.”
He lifted the decanter.
Blake shook his head. “If there is some way I can get back home. It has been quite a night.”
“You could stay the night with us.”
“Thank you, senator, but if there is some way …”
“Certainly,” said the senator. “One of the guards can take you. We had better use the ground car. Bad night for a floater.”
“I would appreciate it.”
“It’ll give one of the guards a chance to be of use,” said the senator. “Driving you home, they won’t be seeing wolves. By the way, when you were out there, you didn’t see a wolf?”
“No,” said Blake, “I didn’t see a wolf.”
4
Michael Daniels stood at the window and watched the ground crew at the Riverside development across the boulevard bring the houses in. The black foundation blocks gleamed wetly in the night and the Potomac, a quarter mile beyond, was a sheet of inky darkness that picked up and reflected back the gleam of the landing lights.
Slowly, one by one, the houses came lum
bering down out of the cloud-fogged sky, to stop above their assigned foundations, hovering there and moving slowly and deliberately to square their landing grids with the foundation patterns.
Patients coming in, thought Daniels. Or, perhaps, staff members returning from a holiday. Although there might be, as well, others who were unconnected with the hospital, either as patient or as staff. The town was crowded, with the regional bioengineering hearings due to open in a day or two. Space was at a premium and migrating houses were being squeezed in wherever accommodations could be found.
Far across the river, somewhere over Old Virginia, its lights dimmed by fog and drizzle, a ship was coming in, heading for a landing at the spaceport.
Following its flight, Daniels speculated from what far star it might have come. And how long away from home? He smiled ruefully to himself. These were questions that he always asked—a holdover from a boyhood when he had held the hard determination that some day he would travel to the stars.
But in this, he knew, he was not unusual. Every boy, these days, dreamed of going to the stars.
Streams of moisture ran in jagged patterns down the smooth glass of the windows and beyond the windows the houses still came floating in, filling up the few foundations still available. A few ground cars went sliding smoothly along the boulevard, the cushions of air on which they rode throwing out a wide spray of water from the dampened surface. It was too foul a night, he told himself, for many floaters to be out.
He should be getting home, he knew. He should have left long ago. The kids would be in bed by now, but Cheryl would be waiting up for him.
To the east, almost beyond the angle of his vision, glowing by reflected light, he could see the ghost-like whiteness of the shaft that rose beside the river in honor of the first astronauts, who had gone out more than five hundred years ago to circle earth in space, boosted there by the raw, brute power of chemical reaction.
Washington, he thought, a town of mouldering buildings, and filled with monuments—a tangle of marble and of granite, and thick with the moss of old associations, its metal and its stone veneered with the patina of ancient memories and with the aura of once-great power still hanging over it. Once the national capital of an old republic, now no more than a seat of provincial government, it still held an air of greatness draped about it like a cloak.
And it was best, he thought, at a time like this, when a soft, wet night had fallen over it, creating an illusive background through which old ghosts could move.
The hushed sounds of a hospital at night whispered in the room—the soft padding of a nurse going down the corridor, the muted rumble of a cart, the low buzzing of a call bell at the station just across the hall.
Behind him someone opened the door. Daniels swung around.
“Good evening, Gordy,” he said.
Gordon Barnes, a resident, grinned at him. “I thought you’d be gone by now,” he said.
“Just about to. I was going over that report.”
He gestured at the table in the center of the room.
Barnes picked up the file of papers and glanced at it.
“Andrew Blake,” he said. “An intriguing piece of business.”
Daniels shook his head in puzzlement. “More than intriguing,” he declared. “It just isn’t possible. How old would you take Blake to be? By just looking at him.”
“Not more than thirty, Mike. Of course we know he could be a couple of hundred, chronologically.”
“If he were thirty, you’d expect some deterioration, wouldn’t you? The body begins wearing out early in the twenties. From there it goes progressively downhill, heading toward old age.”
“I know,” said Barnes. “But not this Blake, I take it.”
“Perfect,” said Daniels. “A perfect specimen. Youthful. More than youthful. Not a blemish. Not a weakness.”
“And no evidence of who he really is?”
Daniels shook his head. “Space Administration has gone through the records with a fine-toothed comb. He could be any one of thousands of people. Within just the last two centuries, several dozen ships have simply disappeared. Went out and no more heard of them. He could be any one of the people who were aboard those ships.”
“Someone froze him,” said Barnes, “and stuck him in the capsule. Could that be a clue of some sort?”
“You mean someone who was so important that someone else took a chance at saving him?”
“Something like that.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Daniels. “Even if they did, it still is a bit too sticky. Fire a man out into space and what are the chances he’ll be found again? A billion to one? A trillion to one? I don’t know. Space is big and empty.”
“But Blake was found.”
“Yes, I know. His capsule floated into a solar system that had been colonized less than a hundred years ago and a gang of asteroid miners found him. The capsule had taken up an orbit around an asteroid and they saw it flashing in the sun and got curious. Too much flash to it. Had dreams of finding a monstrous diamond or something. A few years longer and he would have crashed on the asteroid. Try to figure out those odds.”
Barnes laid the folder back on the table and walked over to the window to stand beside Daniels.
“I agree with you,” he said. “It makes little sense. The odds keep working for the man. Even after he was found, someone could have broken open the capsule. They knew there was a man in there. The capsule was transparent; they could see him. Someone could have gotten the wild idea of trying to thaw him out and resuscitating him. It could have been worth their while. Who knows, he might have some information that it would be worth their having.”
“Fat lot of good it would have done,” said Daniels. “That’s another thing. Blake’s mind was blank except for a general human background—the kind of general background a man could have gotten only on the Earth. He had the language and the human outlook and the sort of basic information that a man who lived two hundred years ago would have stored away. But that was all. No slightest memory of what might have happened to him or who he was or where he might have come from.”
“There is no question that he originally came from Earth? Not from one of the stellar colonies?”
“There doesn’t seem to be. He knew where and what Washington was once we had revived him. But to him it still was the capital of the United States. And there were a lot of other things, as well, that only an Earthman would have known. As you can well imagine, we ran him through quite a bunch of tests.”
“How is he getting along?”
“Apparently all right. I haven’t heard from him. He’s in a little community west of here. Out in the mountains. He thought, and I thought, he should get some resting time. Time just to take it easy. That might give him a chance to do some thinking, do some probing back. By now he may be beginning to recall who and what he was. I didn’t suggest it—I didn’t want to put any burden on him. But I’d think it would be natural that he might. He was a bit upset about it all.”
“And if he does, he’ll tell you?”
“I don’t know,” said Daniels. “I would hope he might. But I kept no strings on him. I didn’t think it wise. Let him do it on his own. If he gets in trouble, I think he’ll get in touch.”
5
Blake stood on the patio and watched the red tail lights of the ground car recede swiftly up the street.
The rain had stopped and through the scudding clouds a few stars could be seen. Up and down the street, the houses stood dark, with only the yard lights burning. In his own house a light was burning in the entry hall—a sign that the house was waiting up for him. To the west the mountains humped, a darker blot against the sky.
The wind that came cutting out of the northwest was cold and Blake pulled the brown wool of the robe tight about his chest and shucked it up about his ears.
Hunched in the robe, Blake turned and crossed the patio, mounted the short three steps up to the door. The door came open and he stepped in
side.
“Good evening, sir,” said the House, and then, in a tone of reprimand, “it appears you were detained.”
“Something happened to me,” said Blake. “Would you have any idea what it might have been?”
“You left the patio,” said the House, disgusted that he should expect further information from it. “You are aware, of course, that our concern does not extend beyond the patio.”
“Yes,” mumbled Blake. “I am aware of that.”
“You should have let us know you were going out,” the House said, sternly. “You could have made arrangements to keep in touch with us. We would have provided clothing that was appropriate. As it is, I see you have come back with clothing different than you were wearing when you left.”
“A friend loaned it to me,” said Blake.
“While you were gone,” the House told him, “a message came for you. It is on the P.G.”
The postalgraph machine stood to one side of the entry way. Blake stepped over to it and pulled out the sheet of paper projecting from its face. The message was written in precise, bold hand and was short and formal. It read:
If Mr. Andrew Blake should find it convenient to contact Mr. Ryan Wilson at the town of Willow Grove, he might learn something to his great advantage.
Blake held the sheet gingerly between his fingers. It was incredible, he thought. It smelled of melodrama.
“Willow Grove?” he asked.
Said the House, “We’ll look it up.”
“If you please,” said Blake.
“A bath can be ready in a moment,” said the House, “if that is what you wish?”
“Food also can be ready soon,” yelled the Kitchen. “What does the master wish?”
“I think,” said Blake, “I would like some food. How about some ham and eggs and a slice or two of toast.”
“Something else could be made as easily,” said the Kitchen. “Welsh rarebit? Lobster thermidor?”
“Ham and eggs,” said Blake.
“How about the decor?” asked the House. “We have had the present one for an unseemly length of time.”
“No,” Blake told it, wearily, “leave it as it is. Leave the decor be. It doesn’t really matter.”