Dusty Zebra : And Other Stories

Hobbies

The rabbit ducked around a bush and the little black dog zipped after him, then dug in his heels and skidded. In the pathway stood a wolf, the rabbit’s twitching, bloody body hanging from his jaws.

Ebenezer stood very still and panted, red rag of a tongue lolling out, a little faint and sick at the sight before him.

It had been such a nice rabbit!

Feet pattered on the trail behind him and Shadow whizzed around the bush, slid to a stop alongside Ebenezer.

The wolf flicked his glare from the dog to the pint-size robot, then back to the dog again. The yellow light of wildness slowly faded from his eyes.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Wolf,” said Ebenezer, softly. “The rabbit knew I wouldn’t hurt him and it was all in fun. But he ran straight into you and you snapped him up.”

“There’s no use talking to him,” Shadow hissed out of the corner of his mouth. “He doesn’t know a word you’re saying. Next thing you know, he’ll be gulping you.”

“Not with you around, he won’t,” said Ebenezer. “And, anyhow, he knows me. He remembers last winter. He was one of the pack we fed.”

The wolf paced forward slowly, step by cautious step, until less than two feet separated him from the little dog. Then, very slowly, very carefully, he laid the rabbit on the ground, nudged it forward with his nose.

Shadow made a tiny sound that was almost a gasp. “He’s giving it to you!”

“I know,” said Ebenezer calmly. “I told you he remembered. He’s the one that had a frozen ear and Jenkins fixed it up.”

The dog advanced a step, tail wagging, nose outstretched. The wolf stiffened momentarily, then lowered his ugly head and sniffed. For a second the two noses almost rubbed together, then the wolf stepped back.

“Let’s get out of here,” urged Shadow. “You high-tail it down the trail and I’ll bring up the rear. If he tries anything—”

“He won’t try anything,” snapped Ebenezer. “He’s a friend of ours. It’s not his fault about the rabbit. He doesn’t understand. It’s the way he lives. To him a rabbit is just a piece of meat.”

Even, he thought, as it once was for us. As it was for us before the first dog came to sit with a man before a cave-mouth fire—and for a long time after that. Even now a rabbit sometime—

Moving slowly, almost apologetically, the wolf reached forward, gathered up the rabbit in his gaping jaws. His tail moved—not quite a wag, but almost.

“You see!” cried Ebenezer and the wolf was gone. His feet moved and there was a blur of gray fading through the trees—a shadow drifting in the forest.

“He took it back,” fumed Shadow. “Why, the dirty—”

“But he gave it to me,” said Ebenezer, triumphantly. “Only he was so hungry he couldn’t make it stick. He did something a wolf has never done before. For a moment he was more than an animal.”

“Indian giver,” snapped Shadow.

Ebenezer shook his head. “He was ashamed when he took it back. You saw him wag his tail. That was explaining to me—explaining he was hungry and he needed it. Worse than I needed it.”

The dog stared down the green aisles of the fairy forest, smelled the scent of decaying leaves, the heady perfume of hepaticas and bloodroot and spidery windflower, the quick, sharp odor of the new leaf, of the woods in early spring.

“Maybe some day—” he said.

“Yeah, I know,” said Shadow. “Maybe some day the wolves will be civilized, too. And the rabbits and squirrels and all the other wild things. The way you dogs go mooning around—”

“It isn’t mooning,” Ebenezer told him. “Dreaming, maybe. Men used to dream. They used to sit around and think up things. That’s how we happened. A man named Webster thought us up. He messed around with us. He fixed up our throats so we could talk. He rigged up contact lenses so that we could read. He—”

“A lot of good it did men for all their dreaming,” said Shadow, peevishly.

And that, thought Ebenezer, was the solemn truth. Not many men left now. Just the mutants squatting in their towers and doing God knows what and the little colony of real men still living in Geneva. The others, long ago, had gone to Jupiter. Had gone to Jupiter and changed themselves into things that were not human.

Slowly, tail drooping, Ebenezer swung around, clumped slowly up the path.

Too bad about the rabbit, he thought. It had been such a nice rabbit. It had run so well. And it really wasn’t scared. He had chased it lots of times and it knew he wouldn’t catch it.

But even at that, Ebenezer couldn’t bring himself to blame the wolf. To a wolf a rabbit wasn’t just something that was fun to chase. For the wolf had no herds for meat and milk, no fields of grain for meal to make dog biscuits.

“What I ought to do,” grumbled the remorseless Shadow, treading at his heels, “is tell Jenkins that you ran out. You know that you should be listening.”

Ebenezer did not answer, kept on trudging up the trail. For what Shadow said was true. Instead of rabbit-chasing, he should have been sitting up at Webster House listening—listening for the things that came to one—sounds and scents and awareness of something that was near. Like listening on one side of a wall to the things that were happening on the other, only they were faint and sometimes far away and hard to catch. Even harder, most times, to understand.

It’s the animal in me, thought Ebenezer. The old flea-scratching, bone-chewing, gopher-digging dog that will not let me be—that sends me sneaking out to chase a rabbit when I should be listening, out prowling the forest when I should be reading the old books from the shelves that line the study wall.

Too fast, he told himself. We came up too fast. Had to come up too fast.

It took Man thousands of years to turn his grunts into the rudiments of speech. Thousands of years to discover fire and thousands more of years to invent the bow and arrow—thousands of years to learn to till the soil and harvest food, thousands of years to forsake the cave for a house he built himself.

But in a little more than a thousand years from the day we learned to talk we were on our own—our own, that is, except for Jenkins.

The forest thinned out into gnarled, scattered oaks that straggled up the hill, like hobbling old men who had wandered off the path.

The house stood on the hilltop, a huddled structure that had taken root and crouched close against the earth. So old that it was the color of the things around it, of grass and flowers and trees, of sky and wind and weather. A house built by men who loved it and the surrounding acres even as the dogs now loved them. Built and lived in and died in by a legendary family that had left a meteoric trail across centuries of time. Men who lent their shadows to the stories that were told around the blazing fireplace of stormy nights when the wind sucked along the eaves. Stories of Bruce Webster and the first dog, Nathaniel; of a man named Grant who had given Nathaniel a word to pass along; of another man who had tried to reach the stars and of the old man who had sat waiting for him in the wheelchair on the lawn. And other stories of the ogre mutants the dogs had watched for years.

And now the men had gone and the family was a name and the dogs carried on as Grant had told Nathaniel that far-gone day they must.

As if you were men, as if the dog were man. Those were the words that had been handed down for ten full centuries—and at last the time had come.

The dogs had come home when the men had gone, come from the far corners of the earth back to the place where the first dog had spoken the first word, where the first dog had read the first line of print—back to Webster House where a man, long ago, had dreamed of a dual civilization, of man and dog going down the ages, hand in paw.

“We’ve done the best we could,” said Ebenezer, almost as if he were speaking to someone. “We still are doing it.”

From the other side of the hill came the tinkle of a cow bell, a burst of frantic barking. The pups were bringing in the cows for the evening milking.

The dust of centuries lay within the vault, a gray, powdery dust that was not an alien thing, but a part of the place itself—the part that had died in the passing of the years.

Jon Webster smelled the acrid scent of the dust cutting through the mustiness of the room, heard the silence humming like a song within his head. One dim radium bulb glowed above the panel with its switch and wheel and half a dozen dials.

Fearful of disturbing the sleeping silence, Webster moved forward quietly, half awed by the weight of time that seemed to press down from the ceiling. He reached out a finger and touched the open switch, as if he had expected it might not be there, as if he must feel the pressure of it against his fingertip to know that it was there.

And it was there. It and the wheel and dials, with the single light above them. And that was all. There was nothing else. In all that small, bare vault there was nothing else.

Exactly as the old map had said that it would be.

Jon Webster shook his head, thinking: I might have known that it would have been. The map was right. The map remembered. We were the ones that had forgotten—forgotten or never known or never cared. And he knew that more than likely it was the last that would be right. Never cared.

Although it was probable that very few had ever known about this vault. Had never known because it was best that only few should know. That it never had been used was no factor in its secrecy. There might have been a day—

He stared at the panel, wondering. Slowly his hand reached out again and then he jerked it back. Better not, he told himself, better not. For the map had given no clue to the purpose of the vault, to the mechanics of the switch.

“Defense,” the map had said, and that was all.

Defense! Of course, there would have been defense back in that day of a thousand years ago. A defense that never had been needed, but a defense that had to be there, a defense against the emergency of uncertainty. For the brotherhood of peoples even then was a shaky thing that a single word or act might have thrown out of kilter. Even after ten centuries of peace, the memory of war would have been a living thing—an ever-present possibility in the mind of the World Committee, something to be circumvented, something to be ready for.

Webster stood stiff and straight, listening to the pulse of history beating in the room. History that had run its course and ended. History that had come to a dead end—a stream that suddenly had flowed into the backwater of a few hundred futile human lives and now was a stagnant pool unrelieved by the eddying of human struggle and achievement.

He reached out a hand, put it flat against the masonry, felt the slimy cold, the rough crawl of dust beneath his palm.

The foundation of empire, he thought. The subcellar of empire. The nethermost stone of the towering structure that soared in proud strength on the surface far above—a great building that in olden times had hummed with the business of a solar system, an empire not in the sense of conquest but an empire of orderly human relations based on mutual respect and tolerant understanding.

A seat of human government lent an easy confidence by the psychological fact of an adequate and foolproof defense. For it would have been both adequate and foolproof, it would have had to be. The men of that day took no chances, overlooked no bets. They had come up through the hard school and they knew their way around.

Slowly, Webster swung about, stared at the trail his feet had left across the dust. Silently, stepping carefully, following the trail he’d made, he left the vault, closed the massive door behind him and spun the lock that held its secret fast.

Climbing the tunneled stairs, he thought: Now I can write my history. My notes are almost complete and I know how it should go. It will be brilliant and exhaustive and it might be interesting if anyone should read it.

But he knew that no one would. No one would take the time or care.

For a long moment, Webster stood on the broad marble steps before his house, looking down the street. A pretty street, he told himself, the prettiest street in all Geneva, with its boulevard of trees, its carefully tended flower beds, the walks that glistened with the scrub and polish of ever-working robots.

No one moved along the street and it wasn’t strange. The robots had finished their work early in the day and there were few people.

From some high treetop a bird sang and the song was one with the sun and flowers, a gladsome song that strained at the bursting throat, a song that tripped and skipped with boundless joy.

A neat street drowsing in the sun and a great, proud city that had lost its purpose. A street that should be filled with laughing children and strolling lovers and old men resting in the sun. And a city, the last city on Earth, the only city on Earth, that should be filled with noise and business.

A bird sang and a man stood on the steps and looked and the tulips nodded blissfully in the tiny fragrant breeze that wafted down the street.

Webster turned to the door, fumbled it open, walked across the threshold.

The room was hushed and solemn, cathedral-like with its stained glass windows and soft carpeting. Old wood glowed with the patina of age and silver and brass winked briefly in the light that fell from the slender windows. Over the fireplace hung a massive canvas, done in subdued coloring—a house upon a hill, a house that had grown roots and clung against the land with a jealous grip. Smoke came from the chimney, a wind-whipped, tenuous smoke that smudged across a storm-gray sky.

Webster walked across the room and there was no sound of walking. The rugs, he thought, the rugs protect the quietness of the place. Randall wanted to do this one over, too, but I wouldn’t let him touch it and I’m glad I didn’t. A man must keep something that is old, something he can cling to, something that is a heritage and a legacy and promise.

He reached his desk, thumbed a tumbler and the light came on above it. Slowly, he let himself into a chair, reached out for the portfolio of notes. He flipped the cover open and stared at the title page: “A study of the Functional Development of the City of Geneva.”

A brave title. Dignified and erudite. And a lot of work. Twenty years of work. Twenty years of digging among old dusty records, twenty years of reading and comparing, of evaluating the weight and words of those who had gone before, sifting and rejecting and working out the facts, tracing the trend not only of the city but of men. No hero worship, no legends, but facts. And facts are hard to come by.

Something rustled. No footstep, but a rustle, a sense that someone was near. Webster twisted in his chair. A robot stood just outside the circle of the desk light.

“Beg pardon, sir,” the robot said, “but I was supposed to tell you. Miss Sara is waiting in the Seashore.”

Webster started slightly. “Miss Sara, eh? It’s been a long time since she’s been here.”

“Yes, sir,” said the robot. “It seemed almost like old times, sir, when she walked in the door.”

“Thank you, Roscoe, for telling me,” said Webster. “I’ll go right out. You will bring some drinks.”

“She brought her own drinks, sir,” said Roscoe. “Something that Mr. Ballentree fixed up.”

“Ballentree!” exclaimed Webster. “I hope it isn’t poison.”

“I’ve been observing her,” Roscoe told him, “and she’s been drinking it and she’s still all right.”

Webster rose from his chair, crossed the room and went down the hall. He pushed open the door and the sound of the surf came to him. He blinked in the light that shone on the hot sand beach, stretching like a straight white line to either horizon. Before him the ocean was a sun-washed blue tipped with the white of foaming waves.

Sand gritted underneath his feet as he walked forward, eyes adjusting themselves to the blaze of sunlight.

Sara, he saw, was sitting in one of the bright canvas chairs underneath the palm trees and beside the chair was a pastel, very ladylike jug.

The air had a tang of salt and the wind off the water was cool in the sun-warm air.

The woman heard him and stood up and waited for him, with her hands outstretched. He hurried forward, clasped the outstretched hands and looked at her.

“Not a minute older,” he said. “As pretty as the day I saw you first.”

She smiled at him, eyes very bright. “And you, Jon. A little gray around the temples. A little handsomer. That is all.”

He laughed. “I’m almost sixty, Sara. Middle age is creeping up.”

“I brought something,” said Sara. “One of Ballentree’s latest masterpieces. It will cut your age in half.”

He grunted. “Wonder Ballentree hasn’t killed off half Geneva, the drinks that he cooks up.”

“This one is really good.”

It was. It went down smooth and it had a strange, half metallic, half ecstatic taste.

Webster pulled another chair close to Sara’s, sat down and looked at her.

“You have such a nice place here,” said Sara. “Randall did it, didn’t he?”

Webster nodded. “He had more fun than a circus, I had to beat him off with a club. And those robots of his! They’re crazier than he is.”

“But he does wonderful things. He did a Martian room for Quentin and it’s simply unworldly.”

“I know,” said Webster. “Was set on a deep-space one for here. Said it would be just the place to sit and think. Got sore at me when I wouldn’t let him do it.”

He rubbed the back of his left hand with his right thumb, staring off at the blue haze above the ocean. Sara leaned forward, pulled his thumb away.

“You still have the warts,” she said.

He grinned. “Yes. Could have had them taken off, but never got around to it. Too busy, I guess. Part of me by now.”

She released the thumb and he went back to rubbing the warts absent-mindedly.

“You’ve been busy,” she said. “Haven’t seen you around much. How is the book coming?”

“Ready to write,” said Webster. “Outlining it by chapters now. Checked on the last thing today. Have to make sure, you know. Place way down under the old Solar Administration Building. Some sort of a defense set-up. Control room. You push a lever and—”

“And what?”

“I don’t know,” said Webster. “Something effective, I suppose. Should try to find out, but can’t find the heart to do it. Been digging around in too much dust these last twenty years to face any more.”

“You sound discouraged, Jon. Tired. You shouldn’t get tired. There’s no reason for it. You should get around. Have another drink?”

He shook his head. “No, Sara, thanks. Not in the mood, I guess. I’m afraid, Sara—afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“This room,” said Webster. “Illusion. Mirrors that give an illusion of distance. Fans that blow the air through a salt spray, pumps that stir up the waves. A synthetic sun. And if I don’t like the sun, all I have to do is snap a switch and I have a moon.”

“Illusion,” said Sara.

“That’s it,” said Webster. “That is all we have. No real work, no real job. Nothing that we’re working for, no place we’re going. I’ve worked for twenty years and I’ll write a book and not a soul will read it. All they’d have to do would be spend the time to read it, but they won’t take the time. They won’t care. All they’d have to do would be come and ask me for a copy—and if they didn’t want to do that I’d be so glad someone was going to read it that I’d take it to them. But no one will. It will go on the shelves with all the other books that have been written. And what do I get out of it? Wait… I’ll tell you. Twenty years of work, twenty years of fooling myself, twenty years of sanity.”

“I know,” said Sara, softly. “I know, Jon. The last three paintings—”

He looked up quickly. “But, Sara—”

She shook her head. “No, Jon. No one wanted them. They’re out of style. Naturalistic stuff is passé. Impressionalism now. Daubs—”

“We are too rich,” said Webster. “We have too much. Everything was left for us—everything and nothing. When Mankind went out to Jupiter the few that were left behind inherited the Earth and it was too big for them. They couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t manage it. They thought they owned it, but they were the ones that were owned. Owned and dominated and awed by the things that had gone before.”

She reached out a hand and touched his arm.

“Poor Jon,” she said.

“We can’t flinch away from it,” he said. “Some day some of us must face the truth, must start over again—from scratch.”

“I—”

“Yes, what is it, Sara?”

“I came here to say good-by.”

“Good-by?”

“I’m going to take the Sleep.”

He came to his feet, swiftly, horrified. “No, Sara!”

She laughed and the laugh was strained. “Why don’t you come with me, Jon. A few hundred years. Maybe it will all be different when we awake.”

“Just because no one wants your canvases. Just because—”

“Because of what you said just a while ago. Illusion, Jon. I knew it, felt it, but I couldn’t think it out.”

“But the Sleep is illusion, too.”

“I know. But you don’t know it’s illusion. You think it’s real. You have no inhibitions and you have no fears except the fears that are planned deliberately. It’s natural, Jon—more natural than life. I went up to the Temple and it was all explained to me.”

“And when you awake?”

“You’re adjusted. Adjusted to whatever life is like in whatever era you awake. Almost as if you belonged, even from the first. And it might be better. Who knows? It might be better.”

“It won’t be,” Jon told her, grimly. “Until, or unless, someone does something about it. And a people that run to the Sleep to hide are not going to bestir themselves.”

She shrank back in the chair and suddenly he felt ashamed.

“I’m sorry, Sara. I didn’t mean you. Nor any one person. Just the lot of us.”

The palms whispered harshly, fronds rasping. Little pools of water, left by the surging tide, sparkled in the sun.

“I won’t try to dissuade you,” Webster said. “You’ve thought it out, you know what it is you want.”

It hadn’t always been like that with the human race, he thought. There would have been a day, a thousand years ago, when a man would have argued about a thing like this. But Juwainism had ended all the petty quarrels. Juwainism had ended a lot of things.

“I’ve always thought,” Sara told him, softly, “if we could have stayed together—”

He made a gesture of impatience. “It’s just another thing we’ve lost, another thing that the human race let loose. Come to think it over, we lost a lot of things. Family ties and business, work and purpose.”

He turned to face her squarely. “If you want to come back, Sara—”

She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work, Jon. It’s been too many years.”

He nodded. There was no use denying it.

She rose and held out her hand. “If you ever decide to take the Sleep, find out my date. I’ll have them reserve a place right next to me.”

“I don’t think I ever shall,” he told her.

“All right, then. Good-bye, Jon.”

“Wait a second, Sara. You haven’t said a word about our son. I used to see him often, but—”

She laughed brightly. “Tom’s almost a grown man now, Jon. And it’s the strangest thing. He—”

“I haven’t seen him for so long,” Webster said again.

“No wonder. He’s scarcely in the city. It’s his hobby. Something he inherited from you, I guess. Pioneering in a way. I don’t know what else you’d call it.”

“You mean some new research. Something unusual.”

“Unusual, yes, but not research. Just goes out in the woods and lives by himself. He and a few of his friends. A bag of salt, a bow and arrows—yes, it’s queer,” Sara admitted, “but he has a lot of fun. Claims he’s learning something. And he does look healthy. Like a wolf. Strong and lean and a look about his eyes.”

She swung around and moved away.

“I’ll see you to the door,” said Webster.

She shook her head. “No. I’d rather that you wouldn’t.”

“You’re forgetting the jug.”

“You keep it, Jon. I won’t need it where I’m going.”

Webster put on the plastic “thinking cap,” snapped the button of the writer on his desk.

Chapter Twenty-six, he thought and the writer clicked and chuckled and wrote “Chapter XXVI.”

For a moment Webster held his mind clear, assembling his data, arranging his outline, then he began again. The writer clicked and gurgled, hummed into steady work:

The machines ran on, tended by the robots as they had been before, producing all the things they had produced before.

And the robots worked as they knew it was their right to work, their right and duty, doing the things they had been made to do.

The machines went on and the robots went on, producing wealth as if there were men to use it, just as if there were millions of men instead of a bare five thousand.

And the five thousand who had stayed behind or who had been left behind suddenly found themselves the masters of a world that had been geared to the millions, found themselves possessed of the wealth and services that only months before had been the wealth and services that had been due the millions.

There was no government, but there was no need of government, for all the crimes and abuses that government had held in check were as effectively held in check by the sudden wealth the five thousand had inherited. No man will steal when he can pick up what he wants without the bother of thievery. No man will contest with his neighbor over real estate when the entire world is real estate for the simple taking. Property rights almost overnight became a phrase that had no meaning in a world where there was more than enough for all.

Crimes of violence long before had been virtually eliminated from human society and with the economic pressure eased to a point where property rights ceased to be a point of friction, there was no need of government. No need, in fact, of many of the encumbrances of custom and convenience which man had carried forward from the beginnings of commerce. There was no need of currency, for exchange had no meaning in a world where to get a thing one need but ask for it or take it.

Relieved of economic pressure, the social pressures lessened, too. A man no longer found it necessary to conform to the standards and the acts of custom which had played so large a part in the post-Jovian world as an indication of commercial character.

Religion, which had been losing ground for centuries, entirely disappeared. The family unit, held together by tradition and by the economic necessity of a provider and protector, fell apart. Men and women lived together as they wished, parted when they wished. For there was no economic reason, no social reason why they shouldn’t.

Webster cleared his mind and the machine purred softly at him. He put up his hands, took off the cap, reread the last paragraph of the outline.

There, he thought, there is the root of it. If the families had stayed together. If Sara and I had stayed together.

He rubbed the warts on the back of his hand, wondering:

Wonder if Tom goes by my name or hers. Usually they take their mother’s name. I know I did at first until my mother asked me to change it. Said it would please my father and she didn’t mind. Said he was proud of the name he bore and I was his only child. And she had others.

If only we had stayed together. Then there’d be something worth living for. If we’d stayed together, Sara wouldn’t be taking the Sleep, wouldn’t be lying in a tank of fluid in suspended animation with the “dream cap” on her head.

Wonder what kind of dream she chose—what kind of synthetic life she picked out to live. I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t dare. It’s not the kind of thing, after all, that one can ask.

He reached out and picked up the cap again, put it on his head, marshaled his thoughts anew. The writer clicked into sudden life:

Man was bewildered. But not for long. Man tried. But not for long.

For the five thousand could not carry on the work of the millions who had gone to Jupiter to enter upon a better life in alien bodies. The five thousand did not have the skill, nor the dreams, nor the incentive.

And there were the psychological factors. The psychological factor of tradition which bore like a weight upon the minds of the men who had been left behind. The psychological factor of Juwainism which forced men to be honest with themselves and others, which forced men to perceive at last the hopelessness of the things they sought to do. Juwainism left no room for false courage. And false, foolhardy courage that didn’t know what it was going up against was the one thing the five thousand needed most.

What they did suffered by comparison with what had been done before and at last they came to know that the human dream of millions was too vast a thing for five thousand to attempt.

Life was good. Why worry? There was food and clothes and shelter, human companionship and luxury and entertainment—there was everything that one could ever wish.

Man gave up trying. Man enjoyed himself. Human achievement became a zero factor and human life a senseless paradise.

Webster took off the cap again, reached out and clicked off the writer.

If someone would only read it once I get it done, he thought. If someone would read and understand. If someone could realize where human life is going.

I could tell them, of course. I could go out and buttonhole them one by one and hold them fast until I told them what I thought. And they would understand, for Juwainism would make them understand. But they wouldn’t pay attention. They’d tuck it all away in the backs of their brains somewhere for future reference and they’d never have the time or take the trouble to drag it out again.

They’d go on doing the foolish things they’re doing, following the footless hobbies they have taken up in lieu of work. Randall with his crew of zany robots going around begging to be allowed to re-design his neighbors’ homes. Ballentree spending hours on end figuring out new alcoholic mixtures. Yes, and Jon Webster wasting twenty years digging into the history of a single city.

A door creaked faintly and Webster swung around. The robot catfooted into the room.

“Yes, what is it, Roscoe?”

The robot halted, a dim figure in the half-light of the dusk-filled room.

“It’s time for dinner, sir. I came to see—”

“Whatever you can think up,” said Webster. “And, Roscoe, you can lay the fire.”

“The fire is laid, sir.”

Roscoe stalked across the room, bent above the fireplace. Flame flickered in his hand and the kindling caught.

Webster, slouched in his chair staring at the flames crawling up the wood, heard the first, faint hiss and crackle of the wood, the suction mumble at the fireplace throat.

“It’s pretty, sir,” said Roscoe.

“You like it, too?”

“Indeed I do.”

“Ancestral memories,” said Webster, soberly. “Remembrance of the forge that made you.”

“You think so, sir?” asked Roscoe.

“No, Roscoe, I was joking. Anachronisms, that’s what you and I are. Not many people have fires these days. No need for them. But there’s something about them, something that is clean and comforting.”

He stared at the canvas above the mantelpiece, lighted now by the flare of burning wood. Roscoe saw his stare.

“Too bad about Miss Sara, sir.”

Webster shook his head. “No, Roscoe, it was something that she wanted. Like turning off one life and starting on another. She will lie up there in the Temple, asleep for years, and she will live another life. And this one, Roscoe, will be a happy life. For she would have it planned that way.”

His mind went back to other days in this very room.

“She painted that picture, Roscoe,” he said. “Spent a long time at it, being very careful to catch the thing she wanted to express. She used to laugh at me and tell me I was in the painting, too.”

“I don’t see you, sir,” said Roscoe.

“No. I’m not. And yet, perhaps, I am. Or part of me. Part of what and where I came from. That house in the painting, Roscoe, is the Webster House in North America. And I am a Webster. But a long ways from the house—a long ways from the men who built that house.”

“North America’s not so far, sir.”

“No,” Webster told him. “Not so far in distance. But far in other ways.”

He felt the warmth of the fire steal across the room and touch him.

Far. Too far—and in the wrong direction.

The robot moved softly, feet padding on the rug, leaving the room.

She worked a long time, being very careful to catch the thing she wanted to express.

And what was that thing? He had never asked her and she had never told him. He had always thought, he remembered, that it probably had been the way the smoke streamed, wind-whipped across the sky, the way the house crouched against the ground, blending in with the trees and grass, huddled against the storm that walked above the land.

But it may have been something else. Some symbolism. Something that made the house synonymous with the kind of men who built it.

He got up and walked closer, stood before the fire with head tilted back. The brush strokes were there and the painting looked less a painting than when viewed from the proper distance. A thing of technique, now. The basic strokes and shadings the brushes had achieved to create illusion.

Security. Security by the way the house stood foursquare and solid. Tenacity by the way it was a part of the land itself. Sternness, stubbornness and a certain bleakness of the spirit.

She had sat for days on end with the visor beamed on the house, sketching carefully, painting slowly, often sitting and watching and doing nothing at all. There had been dogs, she said, and robots, but she had not put them in, because all she wanted was the house. One of the few houses left standing in the open country. Through centuries of neglect, the others had fallen in, had given the land back to the wilderness.

But there were dogs and robots in this one. One big robot, she had said, and a lot of little ones.

Webster had paid no attention—he had been too busy.

He swung around, went back to the desk again.

Queer thing, once you came to think of it. Robots and dogs living together. A Webster once had messed around with dogs, trying to put them on the road to a culture of their own, trying to develop a dual civilization of man and dog.

Bits of remembrance came to him—tiny fragments, half recalled, of the legends that had come down the years about the Webster House. There had been a robot named Jenkins who had served the family from the very first. There had been an old man sitting in a wheel chair on the front lawn, staring at the stars and waiting for a son who never came. And a curse had hung above the house, the curse of having lost to the world the philosophy of Juwain.

The visor was in one corner of the room, an almost forgotten piece of furniture, something that was scarcely used. There was no need to use it. All the world was here in the city of Geneva.

Webster rose, moved toward it, stopped and thought. The dial settings were listed in the log book, but where was the log book? More than likely somewhere in his desk.

He went back to the desk, started going through the drawers.

Excited now, he pawed furiously, like a terrier digging for a bone.

Jenkins, the ancient robot, scrubbed his metallic chin with metallic fingers. It was a thing he did when he was deep in thought, a meaningless, irritating gesture he had picked up from long association with the human race.

His eyes went back to the little dog sitting on the floor beside him.

“So the wolf was friendly,” said Jenkins. “Offered you the rabbit.”

Ebenezer jigged excitedly upon his bottom. “He was one of them we fed last winter. The pack that came up to the house and we tried to tame them.”

“Would you know the wolf again?”

Ebenezer nodded. “I got his scent,” he said. “I’d remember him.”

Shadow shuffled his feet against the floor. “Look, Jenkins, ain’t you going to smack him one? He should have been listening and he ran away. He had no business chasing rabbits—”

Jenkins spoke sternly. “You’re the one that should get the smacking, Shadow. For your attitude. You are assigned to Ebenezer, you should be part of him. You aren’t an individual. You’re just Ebenezer’s hands. If he had hands, he’d have no need of you. You aren’t his mentor nor his conscience. Just his hands. Remember that.”

Shadow shuffled his feet rebelliously. “I’ll run away,” he said.

“Join the wild robots, I suppose,” said Jenkins.

Shadow nodded. “They’d be glad to have me. They’re doing things. They need all the help that they can get.”

“They’d bust you up for scrap,” Jenkins told him sourly. “You have no training, no abilities that would make you one of them.”

He turned to Ebenezer. “We have other robots.”

Ebenezer shook his head. “Shadow is all right. I can handle him. We know one another. He keeps me from getting lazy, keeps me on my toes.”

“That’s fine,” said Jenkins. “You two run along. And if you ever happen to be out chasing rabbits, Ebenezer, and run onto this wolf again, try to cultivate him.”

The rays of the westering sun were streaming through the windows, touching the age-old room with the warmth of a late spring evening.

Jenkins sat quietly in the chair, listening to the sounds that came from outside—the tinkle of cowbells, the yapping of the puppies, the ringing thud of an axe splitting fireplace logs.

Poor little fellow, thought Jenkins. Sneaking out to chase a rabbit when he should have been listening. Too far—too fast. Have to watch that. Have to keep them from breaking down. Come fall and we’ll knock off work for a week or two and have some coon hunts. Do them a world of good.

Although there’d come a day when there’d be no coon hunts, no rabbit chasing—the day when the dogs finally had tamed everything, when all the wild things would be thinking, talking, working beings. A wild dream and a far one—but, thought Jenkins, no wilder and no farther than some of the dreams of man.

Maybe even better than the dreams of man, for they held none of the ruthlessness that the human race had planned, aimed at none of the mechanistic brutality the human race spawned. A new civilization, a new culture, a new way of thought. Mystic, perhaps, and visionary, but so had man been visionary. Probing into mysteries that man had brushed by as unworthy of his time, as mere superstition that could have no scientific basis.

Things that go bump in the night. Things that prowl around a house and the dogs get up and growl and there are no tracks in the snow. Dogs howling when someone dies.

The dogs knew. The dogs had known long before they had been given tongues to talk, contact lenses to read. They had not come along the road as far as men—they were not cynical and skeptic. They believed the things they heard and sensed. They did not invent superstition as a form of wishful thinking, as a shield against the things unseen.

Jenkins turned back to the desk again, picked up the pen, bent above the notebook in front of him. The pen screeched as he pushed it along.

Ebenezer reports friendliness in wolf. Recommend council detach Ebenezer from listening and assign him to contact the wolf.

Wolves, mused Jenkins, would be good friends to have. They’d make splendid scouts. Better than the dogs. Tougher, faster, sneaky. They could watch the wild robots across the river and relieve the dogs. Could keep an eye on the mutant castles.

Jenkins shook his head. Couldn’t trust anyone these days. The robots seemed to be all right. Were friendly, dropped in at times, helped out now and then. Real neighborly, in fact. But you never knew. And they were building machines.

The mutants never bothered anyone, were scarcely seen, in fact. But they had to be watched, too. Never knew what devilment they might be up to. Remember what they’d done to man. That dirty trick with Juwainism, handing it over at a time when it would doom the race.

Men. They were gods to us and now they’re gone. Left us on our own. A few in Geneva, of course, but they can’t be bothered, have no interest in us.

He sat in the twilight, thinking of the whiskies he had carried, of the errands he had run, of the days when Websters had lived and died within these walls.

And now—father-confessor to the dogs. Cute little devils and bright and smart—and trying hard.

A bell buzzed softly and Jenkins jerked upright in his seat. It buzzed again and a green light winked on the televisor. Jenkins came to his feet, stood unbelieving, staring at the winking light.

Someone calling!

Someone calling after almost a thousand years!

He staggered forward, dropped into the chair, reached out with fumbling fingers to the toggle, tripped it over.

The wall before him melted away and he sat facing a man across a desk. Behind the man the flames of a fireplace lighted up a room with high, stained-glass windows.

“You’re Jenkins,” said the man and there was something in his face that jerked a cry from Jenkins.

“You … you—”

“I’m Jon Webster,” said the man.

Jenkins pressed his hands flat against the top of the televisor, sat straight and stiff, afraid of the unrobotlike emotions that welled within his metal being.

“I would have known you anywhere,” said Jenkins. “You have the look of them. I should recognize one of you. I worked for you long enough. Carried drinks and … and—”

“Yes, I know,” said Webster. “Your name has come down with us. We remembered you.”

“You are in Geneva, Jon?” And then Jenkins remembered. “I meant, sir.”

“No need of it,” said Webster. “I’d rather have it Jon. And, yes, I’m in Geneva. But I’d like to see, you. I wonder if I might.”

“You mean come out here?”

Webster nodded.

“But the place is overrun with dogs, sir.”

Webster grinned. “The talking dogs?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Jenkins. “and they’ll be glad to see you. They know all about the family. They sit around at night and talk themselves to sleep with stories from the old days and… and—”

“What is it, Jenkins?”

“I’ll be glad to see you, too. It has been so lonesome!”

God had come.

Ebenezer shivered at the thought, crouching in the dark. If Jenkins knew I was here, he thought, he’d whale my hide for fair. Jenkins said we were to leave him alone, for a while, at least.

Ebenezer crept forward on fur-soft pads, sniffed at the study door. And the door was open—open by the barest crack!

He crouched on his belly, listening, and there was not a thing to hear. Just a scent, an unfamiliar, tangy scent that made the hair crawl along his back in swift, almost unbearable ecstasy.

He glanced quickly over his shoulder, but there was no movement. Jenkins was out in the dining room, telling the dogs how they must behave, and Shadow was off somewhere tending to some robot business.

Softly, carefully, Ebenezer pushed at the door with his nose and the door swung wider. Another push and it was half open.

The man sat in front of the fireplace, in the easy-chair, long legs crossed, hands clasped across his stomach.

Ebenezer crouched tighter against the floor, a low involuntary whimper in his throat.

At the sound Jon Webster jerked erect.

“Who’s there?” he asked.

Ebenezer froze against the floor, felt the pumping of his heart jerking at his body.

“Who’s there?” Webster asked once more, and then he saw the dog.

His voice was softer when he spoke again. “Come in, feller. Come on in.”

Ebenezer did not stir.

Webster snapped his fingers at him. “I won’t hurt you. Come on in. Where are all the others?”

Ebenezer tried to rise, tried to crawl along the floor, but his bones were rubber and his blood was water. And the man was striding toward him, coming in long strides across the floor.

He saw the man bending over him, felt strong hands beneath his body, knew that he was being lifted up. And the scent that he had smelled at the open door—the overpowering god-scent—was strong within his nostrils.

The hands held him tight against the strange fabric the man wore instead of fur and a voice crooned at him—not words, but comforting.

“So you came to see me,” said Jon Webster. “You sneaked away and you came to see me.”

Ebenezer nodded weakly. “You aren’t angry, are you? You aren’t going to tell Jenkins?”

Webster shook his head. “No, I won’t tell Jenkins.”

He sat down and Ebenezer sat in his lap, staring at his face—a strong, lined face with the lines deepened by the flare of the flames within the fireplace.

Webster’s hand came up and stroked Ebenezer’s head and Ebenezer whimpered with doggish happiness.

“It’s like coming home,” said Webster, and he wasn’t talking to the dog. “It’s like you’ve been away for a long, long time and then you come home again. And it’s so long you don’t recognize the place. Don’t know the furniture, don’t recognize the floor plan. But you know by the feel of it that it’s an old familiar place and you are glad you came.”

“I like it here,” said. Ebenezer and he meant Webster’s lap, but the man misunderstood.

“Of course, you do,” he said. “It’s your home as well as mine. More your home, in fact, for you stayed here and took care of it while I forgot about it.”

He patted Ebenezer’s head and pulled Ebenezer’s ears.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Ebenezer.”

“And what do you do, Ebenezer?”

“I listen.”

“You listen?”

“Sure, that’s my job. I listen for the cobblies.”

“And you hear the cobblies?”

“Sometimes. I’m not very good at it. I think about chasing rabbits and I don’t pay attention.”

“What do cobblies sound like?”

“Different things. Sometimes they walk and other times they just go bump. And once in a while they talk. Although oftener, they think.”

“Look here, Ebenezer, I don’t seem to place these cobblies.”

“They aren’t any place,” said Ebenezer. “Not on this earth, at least.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Like there was a big house,” said Ebenezer. “A big house with lots of rooms. And doors between the rooms. And if you’re in one room, you can hear whoever’s in the other rooms, but you can’t get to them.”

“Sure you can,” said Webster. “All you have to do is go through the door.”

“But you can’t open the door,” said Ebenezer. “You don’t even know about the door. You think this one room you’re in is the only room in all the house. Even if you did know about the door you couldn’t open it.”

“You’re talking about dimensions.”

Ebenezer wrinkled his forehead in worried thought. “I don’t know that word you said, dimensions. What I told you was the way Jenkins told it to us. He said it wasn’t really a house and it wasn’t really rooms and the things we heard probably weren’t like us.”

Webster nodded to himself. That was the way one would have to do. Have to take it easy. Take it slow. Don’t confuse them with big names. Let them get the idea first and then bring in the more exact and scientific terminology. And more than likely it would be a manufactured terminology. Already there was a coined word—Cobblies—the things behind the wall, the things that one hears and cannot identify—the dwellers in the next room.

Cobblies.

The cobblies will get you if you don’t watch out.

That would be the human way. Can’t understand a thing. Can’t see it. Can’t test it. Can’t analyze it. O.K., it isn’t there. It doesn’t exist. It’s a ghost, a goblin, a cobbly.

The cobblies will get you—

It’s simpler that way, more comfortable. Scared? Sure, but you forget it in the light. And it doesn’t plague you, haunt you. Think hard enough and you wish it away. Make it a ghost or goblin and you can laugh at it—in the daylight.

A hot, wet tongue rasped across his chin and Ebenezer wriggled with delight.

“I like you,” said Ebenezer. “Jenkins never held me this way. No one’s ever held me this way.”

“Jenkins is busy,” said Webster.

“He sure is,” agreed Ebenezer. “He writes things down in a book. Things that us dogs hear when we are listening and things that we should do.”

“You’ve heard about the Websters?” asked the man.

“Sure. We know all about them. You’re a Webster. We didn’t think there were any more of them.”

“Yes, there is,” said Webster. “There’s been one here all the time. Jenkins is a Webster.”

“He never told us that.”

“He wouldn’t.”

The fire had died down and the room had darkened. The sputtering flames chased feeble flickers across the walls and floor.

And something else. Faint rustlings, faint whisperings, as if the very walls were talking. An old house with long memories and a lot of living tucked within its structure. Two thousand years of living. Built to last and it had lasted. Built to be a home and it still was a home—a solid place that put its arms around one and held one close and warm, claimed one for its own.

Footsteps walked across his brain—footsteps from the long ago, footsteps that had been silenced to the final echo centuries before. The walking of the Websters. Of the ones that went before me, the ones that Jenkins waited on from their day of birth to the hour of death.

History. Here is history. History stirring in the drapes and creeping on the floor, sitting in the corners, watching from the wall. Living history that a man can feel in the bones of him and against his shoulder blades—the impact of the long dead eyes that come back from the night.

Another Webster, eh! Doesn’t look like much. Worthless. The breed’s played out. Not like we were in our day. Just about the last of them.

Jon Webster stirred. “No, not the last of them,” he said. “I have a son.”

Well, it doesn’t make much difference. He says he has a son. But he can’t amount to much—

Webster started from the chair, Ebenezer slipping from his lap.

“That’s not true,” cried Webster. “My son—”

And then sat down again.

His son out in the woods with bow and arrows, playing a game, having fun.

A hobby, Sara had said before she climbed the hill to take a hundred years of dreams.

A hobby. Not a business. Not a way of life. Not necessity.

A hobby.

An artificial thing. A thing that had no beginning and no end. A thing a man could drop at any minute and no one would ever notice.

Like cooking up recipes for different kinds of drinks.

Like painting pictures no one wanted.

Like going around with a crew of crazy robots begging people to let you redecorate their homes.

Like writing history no one cares about.

Like playing Indian or caveman or pioneer with bow and arrows.

Like thinking up centuries-long dreams for men and women who are tired of life and yearn for fantasy.

The man sat in the chair, staring at the nothingness that spread before his eyes, the dread and awful nothingness that became tomorrow and tomorrow.

Absent-mindedly his hands came together and the right thumb stroked the back of the left hand.

Ebenezer crept forward through the fire-flared darkness, put his front paws on the man’s knee and looked into his face.

“Hurt your hand?” he asked.

“Eh?”

“Hurt your hand? You’re rubbing it.”

Webster laughed shortly. “No, just warts.” He showed them to the dog.

“Gee, warts!” said Ebenezer. “You don’t want them, do you?”

“No,” Webster hesitated. “No, I guess I don’t. Never got around to having them taken off.”

Ebenezer dropped his nose and nuzzled the back of Webster’s hand.

“There you are,” he announced triumphantly.

“There I’m what?”

“Look at the warts,” invited Ebenezer.

A log fell in the fire and Webster lifted his hand, looked at it in the flare of light.

The warts were gone. The skin was smooth and clean.

Jenkins stood in the darkness and listened to the silence, the soft sleeping silence that left the house to shadows, to the half-forgotten footsteps, the phrase spoken long ago, the tongues that murmured in the walls and rustled in the drapes.

By a single thought the night could have been as day, a simple adjustment in his lenses would have done the trick, but the ancient robot left his sight unchanged. For this was the way he liked it, this was the hour of meditation, the treasured time when the present sloughed away and the past came back and lived.

The others slept, but Jenkins did not sleep. For robots never sleep. Two thousand years of consciousness, twenty centuries of full time unbroken by a single moment of unawareness.

A long time, thought Jenkins. A long time, even for a robot. For even before man had gone to Jupiter most of the older robots had been deactivated, had been sent to their death in favor of the newer models. The newer models that looked more like men, that were smoother and more sightly, with better speech and quicker responses within their metal brains.

But Jenkins had stayed on because he was an old and faithful servant, because Webster House would not have been home without him.

“They loved me,” said Jenkins to himself. And the three words held deep comfort—comfort in a world where there was little comfort, a world where a servant had become a leader and longed to be a servant once again.

He stood at the window and stared out across the patio to the night-dark clumps of oaks that staggered down the hill. Darkness. No light anywhere. There had been a time when there had been lights. Windows that shone like friendly beams in the vast land that lay across the river.

But man had gone and there were no lights. The robots needed no lights, for they could see in darkness, even as Jenkins could have seen, had he but chosen to do so. And the castles of the mutants were as dark by night as they were fearsome by day.

Now man had come again, one man. Had come, but he probably wouldn’t stay. He’d sleep for a few nights in the great master bedroom on the second floor, then go back to Geneva. He’d walk the old forgotten acres and stare across the river and rummage through the books that lined the study wall, then he would up and leave.

Jenkins swung around. Ought to see how he is, he thought. Ought to find if he needs anything. Maybe take him up a drink, although I’m afraid the whisky is all spoiled. A thousand years is a long time for a bottle of good whisky.

He moved across the room and a warm peace came upon him, the close and intimate peacefulness of the old days when he had trotted, happy as a terrier, on his many errands.

He hummed a snatch of tune in minor key as he headed for the stairway´.

He’d just look in and if Jon Webster were asleep, he’d leave, but if he wasn’t, he’d say: “Are you comfortable, sir? Is there anything you wish? A hot toddy, perhaps?”

And he took two stairs at the time.

For he was doing for a Webster once again.

Jon Webster lay propped in bed, with the pillows piled behind him. The bed was hard and uncomfortable and the room was close and stuffy—not like his own bedroom back in Geneva, where one lay on the grassy bank of a murmuring stream and stared at the artificial stars that glittered in an artificial sky. And smelled the artificial scent of artificial lilacs that would go on blooming longer than a man would live. No murmur of a hidden waterfall, no flickering of captive fireflies—but a bed and room that were functional.

Webster spread his hands flat on his blanket-covered thighs and flexed his fingers, thinking.

Ebenezer had merely touched the warts and the warts were gone. And it had been no happenstance—it had been intentional. It had been no miracle, but a conscious power. For miracles sometimes fail to happen, and Ebenezer had been sure.

A power, perhaps, that had been gathered from the room beyond, a power that had been stolen from the cobblies Ebenezer listened to.

A laying-on of hands, a power of healing that involved no drugs, no surgery, but just a certain knowledge, a very special knowledge.

In the old dark ages, certain men had claimed the power to make warts disappear, had bought them for a penny, or had traded them for something or had performed other mumbo-jumbo—and in due time, sometimes, the warts would disappear.

Had these queer men listened to the cobblies, too?

The door creaked just a little and Webster straightened suddenly.

A voice came out of the darkness: “Are you comfortable, sir? Is there anything you wish?”

“Jenkins?” asked Webster.

“Yes, sir,” said Jenkins.

The dark form padded softly through the door.

“Yes, there’s something I want,” said Webster. “I want to talk to you.”

He stared at the dark, metallic figure that stood beside the bed.

“About the dogs,” said Webster.

“They try so hard,” said Jenkins. “And it’s hard for them. For they have no one, you see. Not a single soul.”

“They have you.”

Jenkins shook his head. “But I’m not enough, you see. I’m just… well, just a sort of mentor. It is men they want. The need of men is ingrown in them. For thousands of years it has been man and dog. Man and dog, hunting together. Man and dog, watching the herds together. Man and dog, fighting their enemies together. The dog watching while the man slept and the man dividing the last bit of food, going hungry himself so that his dog might eat.”

Webster nodded. “Yes, I suppose that is the way it is.”

“They talk about men every night,” said Jenkins, “before they go to bed. They sit around together and one of the old ones tells one of the stories that have been handed down and they sit and wonder, sit and hope.”

“But where are they going? What are they trying to do? Have they got a plan?”

“I can detect one,” said Jenkins. “Just a faint glimmer of what may happen. They are psychic, you see. Always have been. They have no mechanical sense, which is understandable, for they have no hands. Where man would follow metal, the dogs will follow ghosts.”

“Ghosts?”

“The things you men call ghosts. But they aren’t ghosts. I’m sure of that. They’re something in the next room. Some other form of life on another plane.”

“You mean there may be many planes of life coexisting simultaneously upon Earth?”

Jenkins nodded. “I’m beginning to believe so, sir. I have a notebook full of things the dogs have heard and seen and now, after all these many years, they begin to make a pattern.”

He hurried on. “I may be mistaken, sir. You understand I have no training. I was just a servant in the old days, sir. I tried to pick up things after… after Jupiter, but it was hard for me. Another robot helped me make the first little robots for the dogs and now the little ones produce their own kind in the workshop when there is need of more.”

“But the dogs—they just sit and listen.”

“Oh, no, sir, they do many other things. They try to make friends with the animals and they watch the wild robots and the mutants—”

“These wild robots? There are many of them?”

Jenkins nodded. “Many, sir. Scattered all over the world in little camps. The ones that were left behind, sir. The ones man had no further use for when he went to Jupiter. They have banded together and they work—”

“Work. What at?”

“I don’t know, sir. Building machines, mostly. Mechanical, you know. I wonder what they’ll do with all the machines they have. What they plan to use them for.”

“So do I,” said Webster.

And he stared into the darkness and wondered—wondered how man, cooped up in Geneva, should have lost touch with the world. How man should not have known about what the dogs were doing, about the little camps of busy robots, about the castles of the feared and hated mutants.

We lost touch, Webster thought. We locked the world outside. We created ourselves a little niche and we huddled in it—in the last city in the world. And we didn’t know what was happening outside the city—we could have known, we should have known, but we didn’t care.

It’s time, he thought, that we took a hand again.

We were lost and awed and at first we tried, but finally we just threw in the hand.

For the first time the few that were left realized the greatness of the race, saw for the first time the mighty works the hand of man had reared. And they tried to keep it going and they couldn’t do it. And they rationalized—as man rationalizes almost everything. Fooling himself that there really are no ghosts, calling things that go bumping in the night the first suave, sleek word of explanation that comes into his mind.

We couldn’t keep it going and so we rationalized, we took refuge in a screen of words and Juwainism helped us do it. We came close to ancestor worship. We sought to glorify the race of man. We couldn’t carry on the work of man and so we tried to glorify it, attempted to enthrone the men who had. As we attempt to glorify and enthrone all good things that die.

We became a race of historians and we dug with grubby fingers in the ruins of the race, clutching each irrelevant little fact to our breast as if it were a priceless gem. And that was the first phase, the hobby that bore us up when we knew ourselves for what we really were—the dregs in the tilted cup of humanity.

But we got over it. Oh, sure, we got over it. In about one generation. Man is an adaptable creature—he can survive anything. So we couldn’t build great spaceships. So we couldn’t reach the stars. So we couldn’t puzzle out the secret of life. So what?

We were the inheritors, we had been left the legacy, we were better off than any race had ever been or could hope to be again. And so we rationalized once more and we forgot about the glory of the race, for while it was a shining thing, it was a toilsome and humiliating concept.

“Jenkins,” said Webster, soberly, “we’ve wasted ten whole centuries.”

“Not wasted, sir,” said Jenkins. “Just resting, perhaps. But now, maybe, you can come out again. Come back to us.”

“You want us?”

“The dogs need you,” Jenkins told him. “And the robots, too. For both of them were never anything other than the servants of man. They are lost without you. The dogs are building a civilization, but it is building slowly.”

“Perhaps a better civilization than we built ourselves,” said Webster. “Perhaps a more successful one. For ours was not successful, Jenkins.”

“A kinder one,” Jenkins admitted, “but not too practical. A civilization based on the brotherhood of animals—on the psychic understanding and perhaps eventual communication and intercourse with interlocking worlds. A civilization of the mind and of understanding, but not too positive. No actual goals, limited mechanics—just a groping after truth, and the groping is in a direction that man passed by without a second glance.”

“And you think that man could help?”

“Man could give leadership,” said Jenkins.

“The right kind of leadership?”

“That is hard to answer.”

Webster lay in the darkness, rubbed his suddenly sweating hands along the blankets that covered his body.

“Tell me the truth,” he said and his words were grim. “Man could give leadership, you say. But man also could take over once again. Could discard the things the dogs are doing as impractical. Could round the robots up and use their mechanical ability in the old, old pattern. Both the dogs and robots would knuckle down to man.”

“Of course,” said Jenkins. “For they were servants once. But man is wise—man knows best.”

“Thank you, Jenkins,” said Webster. “Thank you very much.”

He stared into the darkness and the truth was written there.

His track still lay across the floor and the smell of dust was a sharpness in the air. The radium bulb glowed above the panel and the switch and wheel and dials were waiting, waiting against the day when there would be need of them.

Webster stood in the doorway, smelled the dampness of the stone through the dusty bitterness.

Defense, he thought, staring at the switch. Defense—a thing to keep one out, a device to seal off a place against all the real or imagined weapons that a hypothetical enemy might bring to bear.

And undoubtedly the same defense that would keep an enemy out would keep the defended in. Not necessarily, of course, but—

He strode across the room and stood before the switch and his hand went out and grasped it, moved it slowly and knew that it would work.

Then his arm moved quickly and the switch shot home. From far below came a low, soft hissing as machines went into action. The dial needles flickered and stood out from the pins.

Webster touched the wheel with hesitant fingertips, stirred it on its shaft and the needles flickered again and crawled across the glass. With a swift, sure hand, Webster spun the wheel and the needles slammed against the farther pins.

He turned abruptly on his heel, marched out of the vault, closed the door behind him, climbed the crumbling steps.

Now if it only works, he thought. If it only works. His feet quickened on the steps and the blood hammered in his head.

If it only works!

He remembered the hum of machines far below as he had slammed the switch. That meant that the defense mechanism—or at least part of it—still worked.

But even if it worked, would it do the trick? What if it kept the enemy out, but failed to keep men in?

What if—

When he reached the street, he saw that the sky had changed. A gray, metallic overcast had blotted out the sun and the city lay in twilight, only half relieved by the automatic street lights. A faint breeze wafted at his cheek.

The crinkly gray ash of the burned notes and the map that he had found still lay in the fireplace and Webster strode across the room, seized the poker, stirred the ashes viciously until there was no hint of what they once had been.

Gone, he thought. The last clue gone. Without the map, without the knowledge of the city that it had taken him twenty years to ferret out, no one would ever find that hidden room with the switch and wheel and dials beneath the single lamp.

No one would know exactly what had happened. And even if one guessed, there’d be no way to make sure. And even if one were sure, there’d be nothing that could be done about it.

A thousand years before it would not have been that way. For in that day man, given the faintest hint, would have puzzled out any given problem.

But man had changed. He had lost the old knowledge and old skills. His mind had become a flaccid thing. He lived from one day to the next without any shining goal. But he still kept the old vices—the vices that had become virtues from his own viewpoint and raised him by his own bootstraps. He kept the unwavering belief that his was the only kind, the only life that mattered—the smug egoism that made him the self-appointed lord of all creation.

Running feet went past the house on the street outside and Webster swung away from the fireplace, faced the blind panes of the high and narrow windows.

I got them stirred up, he thought. Got them running now. Excited. Wondering what it’s all about. For centuries they haven’t stirred outside the city, but now that they can’t get out—they’ re foaming at the mouth to do it.

His smile widened.

Maybe they’ll be so stirred up, they’ll do something about it. Rats in a trap will do some funny things—if they don’t go crazy first.

And if they do get out—well, it’s their right to do so. If they do get out, they’ve earned their right to take over once again.

He crossed the room, stood in the doorway for a moment, staring at the painting that hung above the mantel. Awkwardly, he raised his hand to it, a fumbling salute, a haggard goodbye. Then he let himself out into the street and climbed the hill—the route that Sara had walked only days before. The Temple robots were kind and considerate, soft-footed and dignified. They took him to the place where Sara lay and showed him the next compartment that she had reserved for him.

“You will want to choose a dream,” said the spokesman of the robots. “We can show you many samples. We can blend them to your taste. We can—”

“Thank you,” said Webster. “I do not want a dream.” The robot nodded, understanding. “I see, sir. You only want to wait, to pass away the time.”

“Yes,” said Webster. “I guess you’d call it that.”

“For about how long?”

“How long?”

“Yes. How long do you want to wait?”

“Oh, I see,” said Webster. “How about forever?”

“Forever!”

“Forever is the word, I think,” said Webster. “I might have said eternity, but it doesn’t make much difference. There is no use of quibbling over two words that mean about the same.”

“Yes, sir,” said the robot.

No use of quibbling. No, of course, there wasn’t. For he couldn’t take the chance. He could have said a thousand years, but then he might have relented and gone down and flipped the switch.

And that was the one thing that must not happen. The dogs had to have their chance. Had to be left unhampered to try for success where the human race had failed. And so long as there was a human element they would not have that chance. For man would take over, would step in and spoil things, would laugh at the cobblies that talked behind a wall, would object to the taming and civilizing of the wild things of the earth.

A new pattern—a new way of thought and life—a new approach to the age-old social problem. And it must not be tainted by the stale breath of man’s thinking.

The dogs would sit around at night when the work was done and they would talk of man. They would spin the old, old story and tell the old, old tales and man would be a god.

And it was better that way.

For a god can do no wrong.