Ring Around the Sun

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

A GIRL'S voice answered the telephone and Vickers asked for Crawford.

"Mr. Crawford is in conference," said the girl.

"Tell him this is Vickers."

"Mr. Crawford cannot be…. Did you say Vickers? Jay Vickers?"

"That's right. I have news for him."

"Just a minute, Mr. Vickers."

He waited, wondering how long he might have, for the analyzer in the phone booth must have sounded the alarm. Even now members of the exterminator squad must be on their way.

Crawford's voice said: "Hello, Vickers."

"Call off your dogs," said Vickers. "They're wasting their time and yours."

He heard the rage in Crawford's voice. "I thought I told you —»

"Take it easy," Vickers said. "You haven't got a chance of potting me. Your men couldn't do it when they had me cornered. So if you can't kill me, you better dicker with me."

"Dicker?"

"That's what I said."

"Listen, Vickers, I'm not —»

"Of course you will," said Vickers. "That other world business is really rolling now. The Pretentionists are pushing it and it's gathering steam and you're getting hurt. It's time you talked sense."

"I'm tied up with my directors," Crawford said.

"That's fine. They're the ones I really want to talk to."

"Vickers, go away," said Crawford. "You'll never get away with it. No matter what you're planning, you'll never get away with it. You'll never leave here alive. No matter what I do, I can't save you if you keep up this foolishness."

"I'm coming up."

"I like you, Vickers. I don't know why. I have no reason to…"

"I'm coming up."

"All right," said Crawford, wearily. "The blood is on your head."

Vickers picked up the film case and stepped out of the booth. An elevator car was waiting and he walked swiftly toward it, shoulders hunched a little, as if against the anticipated bullet in the back.

"Third floor." he said.

The elevator operator didn't bat an eye. The analyzer by now must have given its signal, but more than likely the operator had his instructions concerning third floor passengers.

Vickers opened the door to North American Research and Crawford was waiting for him in the reception room.

"Come on," said Crawford.

He turned and marched ahead and Vickers followed him down the long hall. He looked at his watch and did fast mental arithmetic. It was going better than he thought. He still had a margin of two or three minutes. It hadn't taken as long to convince Crawford as he had thought it might.

Ann would be calling in ten minutes. What happened in the next ten minutes would decide success or failure.

Crawford stopped in front of the door at the end of the hall.

"You know what you are doing, Vickers?"

Vickers nodded.

"Because," said Crawford, "one slip and…." He made a hissing sound between his teeth and sliced a finger across his throat.

"I understand," said Vickers.

"Those men in there are the desperate ones. There still is time to leave. I won't tell them you were here."

"Cut out the stalling, Crawford."

"What have you got there?"

"Some documentary film. It will help explain what I have to say. You've got a projector in there?"

Crawford nodded. "But no operator."

"I'll run the machine myself," said Vickers.

"A deal?"

"A solution."

"All right, then. Come in."

The shades were drawn and the room was twilit and the long table at which the men sat seemed to be no more than a row of white faces turned toward them.

Vickers followed Crawford across the room, feet sinking into the heavy carpeting. He looked at the men around the table and saw that many of them were public figures.

There, at Crawford's right hand, was a banker and beyond him a man who time and again had been called to the White House to be entrusted with semi-diplomatic missions. And there were others also that he recognized, although there were many that he didn't, and there were a few of them who wore the strange dress of other lands.

Here, then, was the directorate of North American Research, those men who guided the destiny of the embattled normals against the mutant menace — Crawford's desperate men.

"A strange thing has happened, gentlemen," said Crawford. "A most unusual thing. We have a mutant with us."

In the silence the white faces flicked around at Vickers, then turned back again, and Crawford went on talking.

"Mr. Vickers," Crawford went on, "is an acquaintance of some standing. You will recall that we have talked of him before. At one time we hoped he might be able to help us reconcile the differences between the two branches of the race.

"He comes to us willingly and of his own accord and indicated to me he may have a possible solution. He has not told me what that solution might be. I brought him directly here. It's up to you, of course, whether you want to hear what he has to say."

"Why, certainly," said one of them. "Let the man talk."

And another said: "Most happy to."

The others nodded their agreement.

Crawford said to Vickers: "The floor is yours."

Vickers walked to the table's head and he was thinking: So far, so good. Now if only the rest works out. If I don't make a slip. If I can carry it off. Because it was win or lose, there was no middle ground, no backing out.

E set the film case on the table, smiled, and said: "No infernal weapon, gentlemen. It's a film that, with your permission, I'll show you in just a little while."

They did not laugh. They simply sat and looked at him and there was nothing that you could read in their faces, but he felt the coldness of their hatred.

"You're about to start a war," he said. "You're meeting here to decide if you should reach out ad turn the tap…"

The white faces seemed to be leaning forward, all of them straining toward him.

One of them said: "You're either a brave man, Vickers, or an utter fool."

"I've come here," said Vickers, "to end the war before it starts."

He reached into his pocket and his hand came out in a flicking motion and tossed the thing it held onto the table.

"That's a top," he said. "A thing that kids play with — or used to play with, at any rate. I want to talk to you for a minute about a top."

"A top?" said someone. "What is this foolishness?"

But the banker at his right hand said reminiscently: "I had a top like that when I was a boy. They don't make them any more. I haven't seen one of them in years."

He reached out a hand and picked up the top and spun it on the table. The others craned their necks to look at it.

Vickers glanced at his watch. Still on schedule. Now if nothing spoiled it.

"You remember the top, Crawford?" asked Vickers. "The one that was in my room that night?"

"I remember it."

"You spun it and it vanished, "said Vickers.

"And it came back again."

"Crawford, why did you spin that top?"

Crawford licked his lips nervously. "Why, I don't really know. It might have been an attempt to rescue boyhood, an urge to be a boy again."

"You asked me what the top was for."

"You told me it was for going into fairyland and I told you that a week before I would have said that we were crazy — you for saying a thing like that and I for listening to you."

"But before I came in, you spun the top. Tel me, Crawford, why did you do it?"

"Go ahead," the banker urged. "Tell him."

"Why, I did," said Crawford. "I just told you the reason."

Behind Vickers a door opened. He turned his head and saw a secretary beckoning to Crawford.

On time, he thought. Working like a charm. Ann was on the phone and Crawford was being called from the room to talk to her. And that was the way he'd planned it, for with Crawford in the room, the plan would be hopeless.

"Mr. Vickers," the banker said, "I'm curious about this business of the top. What connection is there between a top and the problem that we face?"

"A sort of analogy," Vickers replied. "There are certain basic differences between the normals and the mutants and I can explain them best by the use of a top. But before I do, I'd like you to see my film. After that I can go ahead and tell you and you will understand me. If you gentlemen will excuse me."

He lifted the film case from the table.

"Why, certainly," the banker said. "Go right ahead."

Vickers went back to the stairs which led to the projection booth and opened the door and went inside.

He'd have to work fast and surely, for Ann could not hold Crawford on the phone very long and she had to keep Crawford out of the room for at least five minutes.

He slid the film into the holder and threaded it through the lenses with shaking fingers and clipped it on the lower spool and then swiftly checked what he had done.

Everything seemed all right.

He found the switches and turned them on and the cone of light sprang out to spear above the conference table and on the screen before the table was a brilliantly colored top, spinning, with the stripes moving up and disappearing, moving up and disappearing — The film's sound track said: _Here you see a top, a simple toy, but it presents one of the most baffling illusions…_

The words were right, Vickers knew. Robotic experts had picked out the right words, weaving them together with just the right relationship, just the right inflation, to give them maximum semantic value. The words would hold his audience, fix their interest on the top, and keep it there after the first few seconds.

He came silently down the stairs and moved over to the door. If Crawford should come back, he could hold him off until the job was done.

The sound track said: _Now if you will watch closely, you will see that the lines of color seem to move up the body of the top and disappear_. A child, watching the lines of color, might wonder where they went, and so might anyone….

He tried to count the seconds. They seemed to drag, endlessly. The sound track said: _Watch closely now — watch closely — they come up and disappear — they come up and disappear — come up and disappear_ — There were not nearly so many men at the table now, only two or three now and they were watching so closely that they had not even noticed the others disappear. Maybe those two or three would remain. Of them all, those two or three might be the only ones who weren't unsuspecting mutants.

Vickers opened the door softly and slid out and closed the door behind him.

The door shut out the soft voice of the sound track: _come up and disappear — watch closely — come up and…_

Crawford was coming down the hall, lumbering along.

He saw Vickers and stopped.

"What do you want?" he asked. "What are you out here for?"

"A question," Vickers said, "One you didn't answer in there. Why did you spin that top?"

Crawford shook his head. "I can't understand it, Vickers. It doesn't make any sense, but I went into that fairyland once myself. Just like you, when I was a kid. I remembered it after I talked to you. Maybe because I talked to you. I remembered once I had sat on the floor and watched the top go round and wondered where the stripes were going — you know how they come up and disappear and then another one comes up and disappears. I wondered where they went and I got so interested that I must have followed them, for all at once I was in fairyland and there were a lot of flowers and I picked a flower and when I got back again I still had the flower and that's the way I knew I'd really been in fairyland. You see, it was winter and there were no flowers and when I showed the flower to mother…"

"That's enough," Vickers interrupted. There was sudden elation in his voice. "That is all I need."

Crawford stared at him. "You don't believe me?"

"I do."

"What's the matter with you, Vickers?"

"There is nothing wrong with me," said Vickers.

It hadn't been Ann Carter, after all!

Flanders and he and _Crawford_ — they were the three who had been given life from the body of Jay Vickers!

And Ann?

Ann had within her the life of that girl who had walked the valley with him — the girl he remembered as Kathleen Preston, but who had some other name. For Ann remembered the valley and that she had walked the valley in the springtime with someone by her side.

There might be more than Ann. There might be three of Ann just as there were three of him, but that didn't matter, either. Maybe Ann's name really was Ann Carter as his really was Jay Vickers. Maybe that meant that, when the lives drained back into the rightful bodies, it would be his consciousness and Ann's consciousness that would survive.

And it was all right now to love Ann. For she was a separate person and not a part of him.

Ann — _his_ Ann — had come back to this Earth to place a telephone call and to get Crawford from the room, so that he would not recognize the danger of the top spinning on screen, and now she'd gone back to the other world again and the threat was gone.

"Everything's all right," said Vickers. "Everything's just fine."

Soon he'd be going back himself and Ann would be waiting for him. And they'd be happy, the way she'd said they'd be, sitting there on a Manhattan hilltop waiting for the robots.

"Well, then," said Crawford. "Let's go back in again."

Vickers put out his arm to stop him. "There's no use of going in."

"No use?"

"Your directors aren't there," said Vickers. "They're in the second world. The one, you remember, that the Pretentionists preached about on Street corners all over town."

Crawford stared at him. "The top!"

"That's right."

"We'll start again," said Crawford. "Another board, another…"

"You haven't got the time," said Vickers. "This Earth is done. The people are fleeing from it. Even those who stay won't listen to you, won't fight for you."

"I'll kill you," Crawford said. "I'll kill you, Vickers."

"No, you won't."

They stood face to face silently, tensely.

"No," said Crawford. "No, I guess I won't. I should, but I can't. Why can't I kill you, Vickers?"

Vickers touched the big man's arm.

"Come on, friend," he said softly. "Or should I call you brother?"