The drizzle sifted from the leaden skies, like smoke drifting through the bare-branched trees. It softened the hedges and hazed the outlines of the buildings and blotted out the distance. It glinted on the metallic skins of the silent robots and silvered the shoulders of the three humans listening to the intonations of the black-garbed man, who read from the book cupped between his hands.
“For I am the Resurrection and the Life—”
The moss-mellowed graven figure that reared above the door of the crypt seemed straining upward, every crystal of its yearning body reaching toward something that no one else could see. Straining as it had strained since that day of long ago when men had chipped it from the granite to adorn the family tomb with a symbolism that had pleased the first John J. Webster in the last years he held of life.
“And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me—”
Jerome A. Webster felt his son’s fingers tighten on his arm, heard the muffled sobbing of his mother, saw the lines of robots standing rigid, heads bowed in respect to the master they had served. The master who now was going home—to the final home of all.
Numbly, Jerome A. Webster wondered if they understood—if they understood life and death—if they understood what it meant that Nelson F. Webster lay there in the casket, that a man with a book intoned words above him.
Nelson F. Webster, fourth of the line of Websters who had lived on these acres, had lived and died here, scarcely leaving, and now was going to his final rest in that place the first of them had prepared for the rest of them—for that long line of shadowy descendants who would live here and cherish the things and the ways and the life that the first John J. Webster had established.
Jerome A. Webster felt his jaw muscles tighten, felt a little tremor run across his body. For a moment his eyes burned and the casket blurred in his sight and the words the man in black was saying were one with the wind that whispered in the pines standing sentinel for the dead. Within his brain remembrance marched—remembrance of a gray-haired man stalking the hills and fields, sniffing the breeze of an early morning, standing, legs braced, before the flaring fireplace with a glass of brandy in his hand.
Pride—the pride of land and life, and the humility and greatness that quiet living breeds within a man. Contentment of casual leisure and surety of purpose. Independence of assured security, comfort of familiar surroundings, freedom of broad acres.
Thomas Webster was joggling his elbow. “Father,” he was whispering. “Father.”
The service was over. The black-garbed man had closed his book. Six robots stepped forward, lifted the casket.
Slowly the three followed the casket into the crypt, stood silently as the robots slid it into its receptacle, closed the tiny door and affixed the plate that read:
NELSON F. WEBSTER
2034–2117
That was all. Just the name and dates. And that, Jerome A. Webster found himself thinking, was enough. There was nothing else that needed to be there. That was all those others had. The ones that called the family roll—starting with William Stevens, 1920–1999. Gramp Stevens, they had called him, Webster remembered. Father of the wife of that first John J. Webster, who was here himself—1951–2020. And after him his son, Charles F. Webster, 1980–2060. And his son, John J. II, 2004–2086. Webster could remember John J. II—a grandfather who had slept beside the fire with his pipe hanging from his mouth, eternally threatening to set his whiskers aflame.
Webster’s eyes strayed to another plate. Mary Webster, the mother of the boy here at his side. And yet not a boy. He kept forgetting that Thomas was twenty now, in a week or so would be leaving for Mars, even as in his younger days he, too, had gone to Mars.
All here together, he told himself. The Websters and their wives and children. Here in death together as they had lived together, sleeping in the pride and security of bronze and marble with the pines outside and the symbolic figure above the age-greened door.
The robots were waiting, standing silently, their task fulfilled.
His mother looked at him.
“You’re the head of the family now, my son,” she told him.
He reached out and hugged her close against his side. Head of the family—what was left of it. Just the three of them now. His mother and his son. And his son would be leaving soon, going out to Mars. But he would come back. Come back with a wife, perhaps, and the family would go on. The family wouldn’t stay at three. Most of the big house wouldn’t stay closed off, as it now was closed off. There had been a time when it had rung with the life of a dozen units of the family, living in their separate apartments under one big roof. That time, he knew, would come again.
The three of them turned and left the crypt, took the path back to the house, looming like a huge gray shadow in the midst.
A fire blazed in the hearth and the book lay upon his desk. Jerome A. Webster reached out and picked it up, read the title once again:
“Martian Physiology, With Especial Reference to the Brain” by Jerome A. Webster, M.D.
Thick and authoritative—the work of a lifetime. Standing almost alone in its field. Based upon the data gathered during those five plague years on Mars—years when he had labored almost day and night with his fellow colleagues of the World Committee’s medical commission, dispatched on an errand of mercy to the neighboring planet.
A tap sounded on the door.
“Come in,” he called.
The door opened and a robot glided in.
“Your whiskey, sir.”
“Thank you, Jenkins,” Webster said.
“The minister, sir,” said Jenkins, “has left.”
“Oh, yes. I presume that you took care of him.”
“I did, sir. Gave him the usual fee and offered him a drink. He refused the drink.”
“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 clod 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 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. Supplied the need 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 ordered fumbling. Yours an orderly, logical development of philosophy, workable, practical, applicable, an actual tool.”
Juwain started to speak, hesitated, then went ahead. “I am near to something, something that may be new and startling. Something that will be a tool for you humans as well as for the Martians. I’ve worked on it for years, starting with certain mental concepts that first were suggested to me with arrival of the Earthmen. I have said nothing, for I could not be sure.”
“And now,” suggested Webster, “you are sure.”
“Not quite,” said Juwain. “Not positive. But almost.”
They sat in silence, watching the mountains and the lake. A bird came and sat in one of the scraggly trees and sang. Dark clouds piled up behind the mountain ranges and the snow-tipped peaks stood out like graven stone. The sun sank in a lake of crimson, hushed finally to the glow of a fire burned low.
A tap sounded from a door and Webster stirred in his chair, suddenly brought back to the reality of the study, of the chair beneath him.
Juwain was gone. The old philosopher had come and sat an hour of contemplation with his friend and then had quietly slipped away.
The rap came again.
Webster leaned forward, snapped the toggle and the mountains vanished; the room became a room again. Dusk filtered through the high windows and the fire was a rosy flicker in the ashes.
“Come in,” said Webster.
Jenkins opened the door. “Dinner is served, sir,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Webster. He rose slowly from the chair.
“Your place, sir,” said Jenkins, “is laid at the head of the table.”
“Ah, yes,” said Webster. “Thank you, Jenkins. Thank you very much, for reminding me.”
Webster stood on the broad ramp of the space field and watched the shape that dwindled in the sky with faint flickering points of red lancing through the wintry sunlight.
For long minutes after the shape was gone he stood there, hands gripping the railing in front of him, eyes still staring up into the sky.
His lips moved and they said: “Good-by son”; but there was no sound.
Slowly he came alive to his surroundings. Knew that people moved about the ramp, saw that the landing field seemed to stretch interminably to the far horizon, dotted here and there with hump-backed things that were waiting spaceships. Scooting tractors worked near one hangar, clearing away the last of the snowfall of the night before.
Webster shivered and thought that it was queer, for the noonday sun was warm. And shivered again.
Slowly he turned away from the railing and headed for the administration building. And for one brain-wrenching moment he felt a sudden fear—an unreasonable and embarrassing fear of that stretch of concrete that formed the ramp. A fear that left him shaking mentally as he drove his feet toward the waiting door.
A man walked toward him, briefcase swinging in his hand and Webster, eyeing him, wished fervently that the man would not speak to him.
The man did not speak, passed him with scarcely a glance, and Webster felt relief.
If he were back home, Webster told himself, he would have finished lunch, would now be ready to lie down for his midday nap. The fire would be blazing on the hearth and the flicker of the flames would be reflected from the andirons. Jenkins would bring him a liqueur and would say a word or two—inconsequential conversation.
He hurried toward the door, quickening his step, anxious to get away from the bare-cold expanse of the massive ramp.
Funny how he had felt about Thomas. Natural, of course, that he should have hated to see him go. But entirely unnatural that he should, in those last few minutes, find such horror welling up within him. Horror of the trip through space, horror of the alien land of Mars—although Mars was scarcely alien any longer. For more than a century now Earthmen had known it, had fought it, lived with it; some of them had even grown to love it.
But it had only been utter will power that had prevented him, in those last few seconds before the ship had taken off, from running out into the field, shrieking for Thomas to come back, shrieking for him not to go.
And that, of course, never would have done. It would have been exhibitionism, disgraceful and humiliating—the sort of a thing a Webster could not do.
After all, he told himself, a trip to Mars was no great adventure, not any longer. There had been a day when it had been, but that day was gone forever. He, himself, in his earlier days had made a trip to Mars, had stayed there for five long years. That had been—he gasped when he thought of it—that had been almost thirty years ago.
The babble and hum of the lobby hit him in the face as the robot attendant opened the door for him, and in that babble ran a vein of something that was almost terror. For a moment he hesitated, then stepped inside. The door closed softly behind him.
He stayed close to the wall to keep out of people’s way, headed for a chair in one corner. He sat down and huddled back, forcing his body deep into the cushions, watching the milling humanity that seethed out in the room.
Shrill people, hurrying people, people with strange, unneighborly faces. Strangers—every one of them. Not a face he knew. People going places. Heading out for the planets. Anxious to be off. Worried about last details. Rushing here and there.
Out of the crowd loomed a familiar face. Webster hunched forward.
“Jenkins!” he shouted, and then was sorry for the shout, although no one seemed to notice.
The robot moved toward him, stood before him.
“Tell Raymond,” said Webster, “that I must return immediately. Tell him to bring the ’copter in front at once.”
“I am sorry, sir,” said Jenkins, “but we cannot leave at once. The mechanics found a flaw in the atomics chamber. They are installing a new one. It will take several hours.”
“Surely,” said Webster, impatiently, “that could wait until some other time.”
“The mechanic said not, sir,” Jenkins told him. “It might go at any minute. The entire charge of power—”
“Yes, yes,” agreed Webster, “I suppose so.”
He fidgeted with his hat. “I just remembered,” he said, “something I must do. Something that must be done at once. I must get home. I can’t wait several hours.”
He hitched forward to the edge of the chair, eyes staring at the milling crowd.
Faces—faces—
“Perhaps you could televise,” suggested Jenkins. “One of the robots might be able to do it. There is a booth—”
“Wait, Jenkins,” said Webster. He hesitated a moment. “There is nothing to do back home. Nothing at all. But I must get there. I can’t stay here. If I have to, I’ll go crazy. I was frightened out there on the ramp. I’m bewildered and confused here. I have a feeling—a strange, terrible feeling. Jenkins, I—”
“I understand, sir,” said Jenkins. “Your father had it, too.”
Webster gasped. “My father?”
“Yes, sir, that is why he never went anywhere. He was about your age, sir, when he found it out. He tried to make a trip to Europe and he couldn’t. He got halfway there and turned back. He had a name for it.”
Webster sat in stricken silence.
“A name for it,” he finally said. “Of course there’s a name for it. My father had it. My grandfather—did he have it, too?”
“I wouldn’t know that, sir,” said Jenkins. “I wasn’t created until after your grandfather was an elderly man. But he may have. He never went anywhere, either.”
“You understand, then,” said Webster. “You know how it is. I feel like I’m going to be sick—physically ill. See if you can charter a ’copter—anything, just so we get home.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jenkins.
He started off and Webster called him back.
“Jenkins, does anyone else know about this? Anyone—”
“No, sir,” said Jenkins. “Your father never mentioned it and I felt, somehow, that he wouldn’t wish me to.”
“Thank you, Jenkins,” said Webster.
Webster huddled back into his chair again, feeling desolate and alone and misplaced. Alone in a humming lobby that pulsed with life—a loneliness that tore at him, that left him limp and weak.
Homesickness. Downright, shameful homesickness, he told himself. Something that boys are supposed to feel when they first leave home, when they first go out to meet the world.
There was a fancy word for it—agoraphobia, the morbid dread of being in the midst of open spaces—from the Greek root for the fear—literally, of the market place.
If he crossed the room to the television booth, he could put in a call, talk with his mother or one of the robots—or, better yet, just sit and look at the place until Jenkins came for him.
He started to rise, then sank back in the chair again. It was no dice. Just talking to someone or looking in on the place wasn’t being there. He couldn’t smell the pines in the wintry air, or hear familiar snow crunch on the walk beneath his feet or reach out a hand and touch one of the massive oaks that grew along the path. He couldn’t feel the heat of the fire or sense the sure, deft touch of belonging, of being one with a tract of ground and the things upon it.
And yet—perhaps it would help. Not much, maybe, but some. He started to rise from the chair again and froze. The few short steps to the booth held terror, a terrible, overwhelming terror. If he crossed them, he would have to run. Run to escape the watching eyes, the unfamiliar sounds, the agonizing nearness of strange faces.
Abruptly he sat down.
A woman’s shrill voice cut across the lobby and he shrank away from it. He felt terrible. He felt like hell. He wished Jenkins would get a hustle on.
The first breath of spring came through the window, filling the study with the promise of melting snows, of coming leaves and flowers, of north-bound wedges of waterfowl streaming through the blue, of trout that lurked in pools waiting for the fly.
Webster lifted his eyes from the sheaf of papers on his desk, sniffed the breeze, felt the cool whisper of it on his cheek. His hand reached out for the brandy glass, found it empty, and put it back.
He bent back above the papers once again, picked up a pencil and crossed out a word.
Critically, he read the final paragraphs:
The fact that of the two hundred fifty men who were invited to visit me, presumably on missions of more than ordinary importance, only three were able to come, does not necessarily prove that all but those three are victims of agoraphobia. Some may have had legitimate reasons for being unable to accept my invitation. But it does indicate a growing unwillingness of men living under the mode of Earth existence set up following the breakup of the cities to move from familiar places, a deepening instinct to stay among the scenes and possessions which in their mind have become associated with contentment and graciousness of life.
What the result of such a trend will be, no one can clearly indicate since it applies to only a small portion of Earth’s population. Among the larger families economic pressure forces some of the sons to seek their fortunes either in other parts of the Earth or on one of the other planets. Many others deliberately seek adventure and opportunity in space while still others become associated with professions or trades which make a sedentary existence impossible.
He flipped the page over, went on to the last one.
It was a good paper, he knew, but it could not be published, not just yet. Perhaps after he had died. No one, so far as he could determine, had ever so much as realized the trend, had taken as matter of course the fact that men seldom left their homes. Why, after all, should they leave their homes?
Certain dangers may be recognized in—
The televisor muttered at his elbow and he reached out to flip the toggle.
The room faded and he was face to face with a man who sat behind a desk, almost as if he sat on the opposite side of Webster’s desk. A gray-haired man with sad eyes behind heavy lenses.
For a moment Webster stared, memory tugging at him.
“Could it be—” he asked and the man smiled gravely.
“I have changed,” he said. “So have you. My name is Clayborne. Remember? The Martian medical commission—”
“Clayborne! I’d often thought of you. You stayed on Mars.”
Clayborne nodded. “I’ve read your book, doctor. It is a real contribution. I’ve often thought one should be written, wanted to myself, but I didn’t have the time. Just as well I didn’t. You did a better job. Especially on the brain.”
“The Martian brain,” Webster told him, “always intrigued me. Certain peculiarities. I’m afraid I spent more of those five years taking notes on it than I should have. There was other work to do.”
“A good thing you did,” said Clayborne. “That’s why I’m calling you now. I have a patient—a brain operation. Only you can handle it.”
Webster gasped, his hands trembling. “You’ll bring him here?”
Clayborne shook his head. “He cannot be moved. You know him, I believe. Juwain, the philosopher.”
“Juwain!” said Webster. “He’s one of my best friends. We talked together just a couple of days ago.”
“The attack was sudden,” said Clayborne. “He’s been asking for you.”
Webster was silent and cold—cold with a chill that crept upon him from some unguessed place. Cold that sent perspiration out upon his forehead, that knotted his fists.
“If you start immediately,” said Clayborne, “you can be here on time. I’ve already arranged with the World Committee to have a ship at your disposal instantly. The utmost speed is necessary.”
“But,” said Webster, “but … I cannot come.”
“You can’t come!”
“It’s impossible,” said Webster. “I doubt in any case that I am needed. Surely, you yourself—”
“I can’t,” said Clayborne. “No one can but you. No one else has the knowledge. You hold Juwain’s life in your hands. If you come, he lives. If you don’t, he dies.”
“I can’t go into space,” said Webster.
“Anyone can go into space,” snapped Clayborne. “It’s not like it used to be. Conditioning of any sort desired is available.”
“But you don’t understand,” pleaded Webster. “You—”
“No, I don’t,” said Clayborne. “Frankly, I don’t. That anyone should refuse to save the life of his friend—”
The two men stared at one another for a long moment, neither speaking.
“I shall tell the committee to send the ship straight to your home,” said Clayborne finally. “I hope by that time you will see your way clear to come.”
Clayborne faded and the wall came into view again—the wall and books, the fireplace and the paintings, the well-loved furniture, the promise of spring that came through the open window.
Webster sat frozen in his chair, staring at the wall in front of him.
Juwain, the furry, wrinkled face, the sibilant whisper, the friendliness and understanding that was his. Juwain, grasping the stuff that dreams are made of and shaping them into logic, into rules of life and conduct. Juwain, using philosophy as a tool, as a science, as a stepping stone to better living.
Webster dropped his face into his hands and fought the agony that welled up within him.
Clayborne had not understood. One could not expect him to understand since there was no way for him to know. And even knowing, would he understand? Even he, Webster, would not have understood it in someone else until he had discovered it in himself—the terrible fear of leaving his own fire, his own land, his own possessions, the little symbolisms that he had erected. And yet, not he, himself, alone, but those other Websters as well. Starting with the first John J. Men and women who had set up a cult of life, a tradition of behavior.
He, Jerome A. Webster, had gone to Mars when he was a young man, and had not felt or suspected the psychological poison that ran through his veins. Even as Thomas a few months ago had gone to Mars. But thirty years of quiet life here in the retreat that the Websters called a home had brought it forth, had developed it without his even knowing it. There had, in fact, been no opportunity to know it.
It was clear how it had developed—clear as crystal now. Habit and mental pattern and a happiness association with certain things—things that had no actual value in themselves, but had been assigned a value, a definite, concrete value by one family through five generations.
No wonder other places seemed alien, no wonder other horizons held a hint of horror in their sweep.
And there was nothing one could do about it—nothing, that is, unless one cut down every tree and burned the house and changed the course of waterways. Even that might not do it—even that—
The televisor purred and Webster lifted his head from his hands, reached out and thumbed the tumbler.
The room became a flare of white, but there was no image. A voice said: “Secret call. Secret call.”
Webster slid back a panel in the machine, spun a pair of dials, heard the hum of power surge into a screen that blocked out the room.
“Secrecy established,” he said.
The white flare snapped out and a man sat across the desk from him. A man he had seen many times before in televised addresses, in his daily paper.
Henderson, president of the World Committee.
“I have had a call from Clayborne,” said Henderson.
Webster nodded without speaking.
“He tells me you refuse to go to Mars.”
“I have not refused,” said Webster. “When Clayborne cut off the question was left open. I had told him it was impossible for me to go, but he had rejected that, did not seem to understand.”
“Webster, you must go,” said Henderson. “You are the only man with the necessary knowledge of the Martian brain to perform this operation. If it were a simple operation, perhaps someone else could do it. But not one such as this.”
“That may be true,” said Webster, “but—”
“It’s not just a question of saving a life,” said Henderson. “Even the life of so distinguished a personage as Juwain. It involves even more than that. Juwain is a friend of yours. Perhaps he hinted of something he has found.”
“Yes,” said Webster. “Yes, he did. A new concept of philosophy.”
“A concept,” declared Henderson, “that we cannot do without. A concept that will remake the solar system, that will put mankind ahead a hundred thousand years in the space of two generations. A new direction of purpose that will aim toward a goal we heretofore had not suspected, had not even known existed. A brand new truth, you see. One that never before had occurred to anyone.”
Webster’s hands gripped the edge of the desk until his knuckles stood out white.
“If Juwain dies,” said Henderson, “that concept dies with him. May be lost forever.”
“I’ll try,” said Webster. “I’ll try—”
Henderson’s eyes were hard. “Is that the best you can do?”
“That is the best,” said Webster.
“But, man, you must have a reason! Some explanation.”
“None,” said Webster, “that I would care to give.”
Deliberately he reached out and flipped up the switch.
Webster sat at the desk and held his hands in front of him, staring at them. Hands that had skill, held knowledge. Hands that could save a life if he could get them to Mars. Hands that could save for the solar system, for mankind, for the Martians an idea—a new idea—that would advance them a hundred thousand years in the next two generations.
But hands chained by a phobia that grew out of this quiet life. Decadence—a strangely beautiful—and deadly—decadence.
Man had forsaken the teeming cities, the huddling places, two hundred years ago. He had done with the old foes and the ancient fears that kept him around the common campfire, had left behind the hobgoblins that had walked with him from the caves.
And yet—and yet.
Here was another huddling place. Not a huddling place for one’s body, but one’s mind. A psychological campfire that still held a man within the circle of its light.
Still, Webster knew, he must leave that fire. As the men had done with the cities two centuries before, he must walk off and leave it. And he must not look back.
He had to go to Mars—or at least start for Mars. There was no question there, at all. He had to go.
Whether he would survive the trip, whether he could perform the operation once he had arrived, he did not know. He wondered vaguely, whether agoraphobia could be fatal. In its most exaggerated form, he supposed it could.
He reached out a hand to ring, then hesitated. No use having Jenkins pack. He would do it himself—something to keep him busy until the ship arrived.
From the top shelf of the wardrobe in the bedroom, he took down a bag and saw that it was dusty. He blew on it, but the dust still clung. It had been there for too many years.
As he packed, the room argued with him, talked in that mute tongue with which inanimate but familiar things may converse with a man.
“You can’t go,” said the room. “You can’t go off and leave me.”
And Webster argued back, half pleading, half explanatory. “I have to go. Can’t you understand? It’s a friend, an old friend. I will be coming back.”
Packing done, Webster returned to the study, slumped into his chair.
He must go and yet he couldn’t go. But when the ship arrived, when the time had come, he knew that he would walk out of the house and toward the waiting ship.
He steeled his mind to that, tried to set it in a rigid pattern, tried to blank out everything but the thought that he was leaving.
Things in the room intruded on his brain, as if they were part of a conspiracy to keep him there. Things that he saw as if he were seeing them for the first time. Old, remembered things that suddenly were new. The chronometer that showed both Earthian and Martian time, the days of the month, the phases of the moon. The picture of his dead wife on the desk. The trophy he had won at prep school. The framed short snorter bill that had cost him ten bucks on his trip to Mars.
He stared at them, half unwilling at first, then eagerly, storing up the memory of them in his brain. Seeing them as separate components of a room he had accepted all these years as a finished whole, never realizing what a multitude of things went to make it up.
Dusk was falling, the dusk of early spring, a dusk that smelled of early pussy willows.
The ship should have arrived long ago. He caught himself listening for it, even as he realized that he would not hear it. A ship, driven by atomic motors, was silent except when it gathered speed. Landing and taking off, it floated like thistledown, with not a murmur in it.
It would be here soon. It would have to be here soon or he could never go. Much longer to wait, he knew, and his high-keyed resolution would crumble like a mound of dust in beating rain. Not much longer could he hold his purpose against the pleading of the room, against the flicker of the fire, against the murmur of the land where five generations of Websters had lived their lives and died.
He shut his eyes and fought down the chill that crept across his body. He couldn’t let it get him now, he told himself. He had to stick it out. When the ship arrived he still must be able to get up and walk out the door to the waiting port.
A tap came on the door.
“Come in,” Webster called.
It was Jenkins, the light from the fireplace flickering on his shining metal hide.
“Had you called earlier, sir?” he asked.
Webster shook his head.
“I was afraid you might have,” Jenkins explained, “and wondered why I didn’t come. There was a most extraordinary occurrence, sir. Two men came with a ship and said they wanted you to go to Mars.”
“They are here,” said Webster. “Why didn’t you call me?”
He struggled to his feet.
“I didn’t think, sir,” said Jenkins, “that you would want to be bothered. It was so preposterous. I finally made them understand you could not possibly want to go to Mars.”
Webster stiffened, felt chill fear gripping at his heart. Hands groping for the edge of the desk, he sat down in the chair, sensed the walls of the room closing in about him, a trap that would never let him go.