“Of course it matters,” the House said, tartly. “There is such a thing as …”
“Just leave it be,” said Blake.
“As you wish, master,” said the House.
“Food first,” said Blake, “then the bath, then off to bed. It’s been quite a day.”
“And the message?”
“Forget about it now. We’ll think of it tomorrow.”
“The town of Willow Grove,” said the House, “is northwest of here. Fifty-seven miles. We looked it up.”
Blake walked across the living room into the dining room and sat down at the table.
“You have to come and get it,” wailed the Kitchen. “I can’t bring it to you.”
“I know that,” said Blake. “Tell me when it’s ready.”
“But you’re sitting at the table!”
“The man has a right to sit wherever he may wish,” stormed the House.
“Yes, sir,” said the Kitchen.
The House relapsed into silence and Blake sat in the chair, bone tired.
The wallpaper of the room, he saw, had been animated. Although, come to think of it, it wasn’t really wallpaper. The House had pointed that out to him the day he had arrived.
There were, he thought, so many new things, that he often was confused.
It was a woodland scene, interspersed with meadows, and with a brook that ran through woods and meadow. A rabbit came hopping deliberately along. It stopped beside a clump of clover and settled down to nibble at the blossoms. Its ears went back and forth and it scratched itself, holding its head to one side and hitting gentle strokes with a ponderous hind leg. The brook sparkled in the sunlight as it ran down a tiny rapids and there were flecks of foam and fallen leaves riding on its surface. A bird flew across the scene and landed in a tree. It raised its head and sang, but there was no sound. One could tell that it was singing by the trembling of its throat.
“Would you like the sound turned on?” asked the Dining Room.
“No, thank you. I don’t believe I would. I want just to sit and rest. Some other time, perhaps.”
To sit and rest and think—to get it figured out. To try to find what had happened to him and how it might have happened, and why, of course, as well. And to determine who or what he was, what he had been and what he might be now. It all was, he thought, a nightmare happening while he was wide awake.
Although when morning came, it might be all right again, it might seem all right again. The sun would be shining then and the world be bright. He’d go out for a walk and talk with some of the neighbors up and down the street and it would be all right. Perhaps if he just forgot about it, brushed it from his mind—that, perhaps, would be the best way to handle it. It might not happen again and if it didn’t happen, there’d be no need to worry.
He stirred uneasily in the chair.
“What time is it?” he asked. “How long was I gone?”
“It is almost two o’clock,” said the House. “You went away at eight or very shortly after.”
Six hours, he thought, and he could account for two of them at most. What had happened in those other four hours and why could he not recall them? For that matter, why could he not recall the time when he had been in space and the time before he was in space? Why must his life start with that moment he had opened his eyes in a hospital bed in Washington? There had been another time, there had been other years. He once had held a name and history—and what had happened to blot it all away?
The rabbit finished its munching of the clover and went hopping off. The bird sat on the limb, no longer singing. A squirrel ran head-first down a tree trunk, halted two feet above the ground, spun like a flash and scurried up again. It reached a limb and ran out on it for a ways, then halted, poised, its tail jerking in excitement.
Like sitting in a window, Blake thought, gazing out at the woodland scene—for there was no flatness to it. It had depth and perspective and the color of the landscape was no painted color, but the color one would know if he had looked upon an actual scene.
The House still puzzled and disturbed him, at times made him uncomfortable. There was nothing in his background memory that had prepared him for anything like this. Although he could recall, in that misty time before complete forgetfulness closed down, that someone (whose name he could not recall) had cracked the enigma of gravity and that functioning solar power had been commonplace.
But while the house was energized by its solar power plant and was mobile by virtue of its anti-gravity apparatus, it was much more than that. It was a robot—a robot with a good-servant complex built into it, and at times, it seemed, almost a mother complex. It took care of the people that it housed. It had their welfare firmly fixed in its computer-mind. It talked with them and served them, it reminded them and bullied them and nagged at them and coddled them. It was house and servant and companion all rolled into one. A man, Blake told himself, in time could come to look upon his house as a loyal and loving friend.
The House did everything for you. It fed you and did the washing, it tucked you into bed, and given half a chance, it would wipe your nose. It watched over you and anticipated every single wish and sometimes was objectionable in its wish to do too much. It dreamed up things that it imagined you might like—like animated wallpaper (oops, not wallpaper!) with the rabbit and the singing bird.
But, Blake told himself, it took some getting used to. Maybe not for someone who had lived his life with it. But come back from the stars, God knows from where or when, and be thrown into a house like this—then it took some getting used to.
“Come and get it!” bawled the Kitchen. “Ham and eggs are ready!”
6
It came alive humped in a place it had never sensed before—a strange enclosure inhabited by artifacts made mostly out of wood, although there was some metal and some fabric.
It reacted instantly. It snapped out its defenses and blotted out the place. It built itself into a pyramid, which was a solid state of being, and constructed about itself a sphere of isolation.
It tested for the energy that it would need to power its life and spark its mentality and the energy was there, a surging tide of energy deriving from some source it could not detect.
It found that now it could cogitate. Its mental processes were bright and clear, its logic like a knife. No longer was there a dream-like quality in its thinking. The unquestioned pyramidal body mass gave it stability and a theater in which its mind could operate.
It directed its thinking toward the solution of what had happened to it—how, after an unknown period of time, during which it had only been marginally operative, if even marginally, it suddenly had come free and whole and efficient once again.
It sought for a beginning and there was no beginning, or, perhaps, only a beginning so hazed and indistinct that it could not be sure. It sought and dug and hunted, sniffing through the dark tunnels of its mind, and there was no beginning it could peg down tight and solid.
Although that, it told itself, was of no great consequence, for a beginning might not be essential. Had there ever, it wondered, been a beginning or had it always hunted thus, scrabbling in its mental mazes for an anchor post? A beginning, of course, was not necessary, nor was an ending necessary, either, but somewhere, somehow, there must be an approximation of a beginning and an end.
Perhaps the question, rather, was had there been a past, and it was certain there must have been a past, for its mind was packed with the floating foam of flotsam that came drifting from the past—background bits of information, like the background radiation that could be found upon a planet. It tried to patch the foam into a pattern and no pattern came, for there was no way that the bits of information could be made to fit into one another.
The data, it thought in panic—once there had been data. It was sure there had been data. Once there had been something with which its mind could work. And the data might still be present, but masked or under cover, appearing only in spots and patches, and some o
f it irrelevant, although one could not be sure, for there did not seem to be enough of it to establish relevance.
It squatted in its pyramidal form and listened to the empty thrumming of its mind, a polished able mind, but without the facts to work on—a mind that was running wild and empty, with no accomplishment.
It sought again in the jumbled tangle of the bits and pieces that floated from the past and it found the impression of a rocky, hostile land, out of the rock of which reared up a massive cylinder, black as the rock itself, soaring up into the greyness of the sky until it made one dizzy to try to follow it. And within the cylinder, it knew, was something that defied all imagination, something so great and wondrous that the mind recoiled at the thinking of it.
It sought for the meaning, for some hint or recognition, but there was nothing but the image of the black and rocky land and the blackness and the bleakness of the cylinder that came soaring out of it.
Reluctantly, it let the picture go and dredged for another piece and this time it was a flowery glen that opened on a meadow and the meadow was wild with the thousand hues of a billion blooming flowers. The sound of music shivered in the air and there were living things that romped among the flowers and again there was a meaning here, it knew, but there was no clue that it could find which would allow it to approach the meaning.
There had been another, once. There had been another being and it had been this being which had snared and held the pictures and transmitted them—and not the pictures only, but the data that went with them. And still the pictures were filed within the mind, although jumbled all together, but the data that was tied in with them had somehow disappeared.
It crouched lower and deeper and more massively into its pyramidal form and within its brain the emptiness and the chaos ached and it tried gropingly to go back into its twilit past to find that other creature which had supplied the picture and the data.
But there was nothing to be found. There was no way to reach out and touch this other one. And it wept in loneliness, deep inside itself, without tears or sobbing, for it was not equipped for either tears or sobbing.
And in the bareness of its grief it drove back deeper into time and found a time when there had been no creature, when it still had worked with data and with abstract pictures based upon the data, but there had been no color in either the data or the concept and the pictures so erected had been stiff and prim and at times even terrifying.
There was no use, it thought. There was no use of trying. It still was inefficient, it was only half itself, and it could not function properly because it lacked the material to perform its function. It sensed the blackness drifting in upon it and it did not fight against it. It stayed and waited and let the blackness come.
7
Blake awoke and the Room was screaming at him.
“Where did you go?” it screamed at him. “Where did you go? What happened to you?”
He was sitting on the floor in the center of the room, sitting with his legs pulled underneath him. And it was not right, for he should have been in bed.
The Room began again. “Where did you go?” it bellowed. “What happened to you? What did …”
“Oh, shut up,” said Blake.
The Room shut up.
Morning sunlight was streaming through the window and somewhere outside a bird was singing. The room was ordinary. Nothing had been changed. It was all exactly as he remembered it when he had gone to bed.
“Now tell me,” he said. “Exactly what did happen?”
“You went away!” wailed the Room. “And you built a wall around you …”
“A wall!”
“A nothingness,” said the Room. “A blob of nothingness. You filled me with a cloud of nothingness.”
Blake said, “You are crazy. How could I do a thing like that?”
But even as he said the words, he knew that the Room was right. The Room could only report the phenomenon that it had sensed. It had no such thing as imagination. It was only a machine, although a sophisticated one, and in its experience there was no such thing as superstition, or myth or fairy tale.
“You disappeared,” declared the Room. “You wrapped yourself in nothing and you disappeared. But before you began to wrap yourself, you changed.”
“How could I change?”
“I don’t know, but you did. You melted and you took another form, or began to take another form, and then you wrapped yourself.”
“And you couldn’t sense me? That’s why you thought that I had gone away.”
“I could not sense you,” said the Room. “I could not penetrate the nothingness.”
“This nothingness?”
“Just nothingness,” said the Room. “I could not analyze it.”
Blake picked himself up off the floor, reached for the pair of shorts he had dropped upon the floor when he’d gotten into bed the night before. He pulled them on and picked up the robe draped across a chair back.
He lifted it and it was heavy and it was brown and it was wool—and suddenly he remembered the night before, the strange stone house and the senator and his daughter.
You changed, the Room had said. You changed and built around yourself a shell of nothingness. But he had no memory of it, not a whisper of a memory.
Nor had he any memory of what had happened the night before in that interval between when he’d walked on the patio and the moment he had found himself standing in the storm, a good five miles from home.
My God, he asked himself, what is going on?
He sat down suddenly on the bed, the robe draped across his knees.
“Room,” he asked, “you’re sure?”
“I am certain,” said the Room.
“Any speculation?”
“You know very well,” the Room said, stiffly, “that I would not speculate.”
“No, of course you wouldn’t.”
“Speculation,” said the Room, “is illogical.”
“You’re right, of course,” said Blake.
He rose and put on the robe and moved toward the door.
“You have nothing more to say?” the Room asked, disapprovingly.
“What could I say?” asked Blake. “You know more of it than I do.”
He went out the door and along the balcony. As he reached the stairway, the House greeted him in its usual cheery morning fashion.
“Good morning, sir,” it sang. “The sun is up and bright. The storm is over and there are no clouds. The forecast is for fair and warm. The present temperature is 49 and before the day is over, it will reach more than 60. A beautiful autumn day has dawned and everything looks fine. Do you have any preferences, sir? How about the decor? How about the furniture? How about some music?”
“Ask him,” the Kitchen bellowed, “what he wants to eat.”
“And, also,” said the House, “what do you want to eat?”
“How about some oatmeal?”
“Oatmeal!” wailed the kitchen. “It is always oatmeal. Or it’s ham and eggs. Or it’s pancakes. Just for once, why not something special? Why not …”
“Oatmeal,” Blake insisted.
“The man wants oatmeal,” said the House.
“O.K.,” said the Kitchen, beaten. “One oatmeal coming up.”
“You must not mind the Kitchen,” said the House. “It labors under a very great frustration. It has all these fancy recipes programmed into its cores and it’s really very good at them, but it almost never gets a chance to use a single one of them. Sometime, sir, just for the hell of it, why don’t you let the Kitchen …”
“Oatmeal,” said Blake.
“Oh, very well, sir. The morning paper is in the P.G. tray. But there’s not much news this morning.”
“If you don’t mind,” said Blake, “I’ll take a look myself.”
“Quite, sir. As you wish, sir. I was only attempting to be informative.”
“Just try,” said Blake, “not to overdo it.”
“Sorry, sir,” said the House.
“I will watch myself.”
In the entry hall he picked up the paper and tucked it underneath his arm. He walked to a side window to look out.
The house next door was gone. The platform stood empty.
“They left this morning,” said the House. “About an hour ago. A short vacation trip, I gather. We all are glad …”
“We?”
“Why, yes. All the other houses, sir. We are glad they’re only to be gone for a short time and will be coming back again. They are such good neighbors, sir.”
“You houses, then, consider yourself neighbors.” spoken to them.”
“Oh,” said the House, “not the people, sir. I wasn’t talking of the people. It was the house itself I was thinking of.”
“You houses, then, consider yourself neighbors.”
“Why, of course we do. We visit among ourselves. We talk back and forth.”
“Just exchanging information.”
“Naturally,” said the House. “But now about the decor.”
“It’s all right as it is.”
“It’s been this way for weeks.”
“Well,” Blake said, thoughtfully, “you might do something about that wallpaper in the dining room.”
“It’s not the wallpaper, sir.”
“I know it’s not. The point I want to make is that I’m getting a little bored watching that rabbit nibble clover.”
“What would you like instead?”
“Anything you like. Just so it has no rabbits in it.”
“But, sir, we can work out some thousands of combinations.”
“Anything you like,” said Blake, “but be sure there are no rabbits.”
He turned from the window and went into the dining room. Eyes stared out at him from the walls—thousands of eyes, eyes without a single face, eyes plucked from many faces and plastered on the walls. And while there were some of them that went in pairs, there were others that stood alone. And every eye was staring straight at him.
There were baby-blue eyes, with the look of wistful innocence, and the bloodshot eyes that glared with fearsomeness, the lecherous eye, the dimmed and rheumy eye of the very old. And they all knew him, knew who he was, and they stared at him in a horribly personal manner and if there had been mouths to go with the eyes they all would be talking at him, screaming at him, mouthing at him.