Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

THERE had been a moment when he had seen his course straight and clear before him — the realization that Kathleen Preston might have been no more than a conditioned personage, that for years the implanted memory of the walk in the enchanted valley had blinded him to the love he bore Ann Carter and the love that he now was sure she felt for him, glossed over with their silly quibbling and their bitter quarreling.

Then had come the realization, too, that his parents slept away the years in suspended animation, waiting for the coming of that world of peace and understanding to which they had given so much.

And he had not been able to turn his back upon them.

Perhaps, he told himself, it was as well, for now there was this other factor — making more than one life out of a single life.

It was a sensible way to do things, and perhaps a valid method, for the mutants needed manpower and when you needed manpower you did the best you could with what you had at hand. You placed in the hands of robots the work that could be left to robots and you took the life of living men and women and out of each of those lives you made several lives, housing the divisional lives in the bodies of your androids.

He was not a person in his own right, but a part of another person, a third of that original Jay Vickers whose body lay waiting for the day when his life would be given back to him again.

And Ann Carter was not a person in her own right, either, but the part of another person. Perhaps a part — and for the first time he forced himself to allow his suspicion to become a clear and terrible thought — perhaps a part of Jay Vickers, sharing with him and with Flanders the life that had been held originally by one.

Three androids now shared the single life: he and Flanders and someone else. And the question beat at him, whispering in his brain: who could that other be?

The three of them were bound by a common cord that almost made them one, and in time the three of them must let their lives flow back into the body of the original Jay Vickers. And when that happened, he wondered, which of them would continue as Jay Vickers? Or would none of them — would it be an equivalent of death for all three and a continuation of the consciousness that Jay Vickers himself had known? Or would the three of them be mingled, so that the resurrected Jay Vickers would be a strange three-way personality combining what was now himself and Flanders and the unknown other?

And the love he bore Ann Carter? In the face of the possibility that Ann might be that unknown other, what about the tenderness he suddenly had felt for her after the moonlight-androses years — what of that love now?

There could be no such love, he knew. If Ann were the third, there could be no love between them. You could not love yourself as you would another person. You could not love a facet of yourself or let a facet of yourself love you. You could not love a person who was closer than a sister or a mother…

Twice he had known love of a woman and twice it had been taken from him and now he was trapped with no other choice but to do the job that had been assigned to him.

He had told Crawford that when he knew what was going on, he'd come back and talk to him and between the two of them they'd see if there was a compromise.

But there was no compromise now, he knew.

Not if his hunch was right.

And Flanders had said that hunch was a better way of reasoning, a more mature, more adult way of arriving at the answer to a problem that was up to you to solve. A method, Flanders had told him, that did away with the winding path of reason that the human race had used through all its formative years.

For the secret weapon was the old, old weapon of deliberate war, waged with mathematical cynicism and calculated precision.

And how many wars, he wondered, could the human race survive? And the answer seemed to be: _Just one more real war_.

The mutants were the survival factor in the race of Man; and now there was nothing left to him, neither Kathleen nor Ann, nor even, perhaps, the hope of personal humanity — he must work as best he could to carry forward the best hope of the human race.

Someone tapped at the door.

"Yes," said Vickers. "Come on in."

"Breakfast will be ready, sir," said Hezekiah, "by the time that you get dressed."