Special Deliverance

30

They stood in an enormous room filled with blue light. Tapestries hung about the walls, and between the tapestries were windows — those portions of the walls not masked by the tapestries. Scattered all about the room were groupings of furniture. In an upholstered basket close to the door a curled-up creature slept. It resembled a cat, but was not a cat.

“Edward,” said Mary, breathlessly, “those windows look out on the world we left. There could have been people in here watching us both now and the other time that we were here.”

“One-way glass,” said Lansing. “A visitor can’t see in, but can be seen from inside the room.”

“It isn’t glass,” she said.

“Well, of course it’s not, but the principle’s the same.”

“They were sitting here,” said Mary, “laughing at us while we were trying to get in.”

The room, in all its emptiness, seemed to be unoccupied. Then Lansing saw them. Sitting in a row on a large couch at the far end of the room were the four card players, sitting there and waiting, their dead-white, skull-like faces staring fixedly at them.

Lansing nudged Mary and gestured at the players. When she saw them, she shrank back against him.

“They’re horrible,” she said. “Will we never get away from them?”

“They have a way of turning up,” he said.

The tapestries, he saw, were not normal tapestries. They moved — or, rather, the scenes that were depicted on them moved. A brook sparkled in the sun and the little waves and eddies brought about as the water gurgled down a rocky incline were actual, moving waves and eddies, not cleverly painted waves and eddies. The branches of the trees that grew along the brook moved in the wind and birds flew about among them. A rabbit crouched, nibbling in a patch of clover, then hopped to another place and resumed its nibbling.

On another of the tapestries young maidens, clothed in gauzelike veils, danced blithely in a forest glade to the piping of a faun who, in his playing, danced more energetically, although less gracefully, than the maidens, his cloven hoofs thumping on the sod. The trees that sur rounded the glade, great misshapen, not quite ordinary, trees, were swaying to the music, also dancing to the pipe.

“We might as well,” said Mary, “go across the room and see what it is they want of us.”

“If they’ll talk to us,” said Lansing. “They may just sit and look at us.”

They started walking down the room. It was a long, awkward length of space to cover with the card players watching, without a muscle moving in their faces. These could be the kind of men, if they were men, who might find it impossible to move their lips to smile, impossible to laugh, impossible to be human.

They sat, unmoving, in a row upon the couch, their hands placed firmly on their knees, with never a flicker of expression to indicate they saw anything at all.

They were so alike, so like four peas in a pod, that Lansing could not think of them as four, but only as a single entity, as if the four were one. He did not know their names. He had never heard their names. He wondered if they might, in fact, have no names. To distinguish one from the other, he assigned them identities, mentally tying tags upon them. Starting from the left, he would think of them as A, B, C and D.

Resolutely, he and Mary marched down the length of room. They came to a halt some six feet from where the players sat. They came to a halt and waited. So far as the card players were concerned, it seemed, they were not even there.

I’ll be damned if I’ll be the first to speak, Lansing told himself. I’ll stand here till they speak. I’ll make them speak.

He put his arm around Mary’s shoulder and held her close against him, the two of them standing side by side, facing the silent players.

Finally A spoke to them, the thin slash of mouth moving just a little, as if it were an effort to force out the words.

“So,” he said, “you have solved the problem.”

“You take us by surprise,” said Mary. “We are not aware a problem has been solved.”

“We might have solved it sooner,” Lansing said, “if we had known what the problem was. Or even that there was a problem. Now, since you say we’ve solved it, what happens? Do we get to go back home?”

“No one ever solves it the first time round,” said B. “They always must come back.”

“You’ve not answered my question,” said Lansing. “What happens now? Do we go back home?”

“Oh, my, no,” said D. “No, you don’t go home. We could not let you go.”

“You must realize,” said C, “that we get so few of you. Out of a few of the groups we may get one, almost never two, as is the case with you. Out of the most of them, we get none at all.”

“They go fumbling off in all directions,” said A. “They go bolting off, seeking sanctuary in the apple-blossom world or they become entranced with the translators or they—”

“By translators,” Mary said, “you mean the machines in the city that keep crooning to themselves?”

“That is our name for them,” said B. “Perhaps you can think of a better name.”

“I wouldn’t even try,” said Mary.

“There’s Chaos,” Lansing said. “That must gobble up a lot of them. Yet you threw me a rope at Chaos.”

“We threw you the rope,” said A, “because you tried to save the robot. At the risk of your own life, never hesitating, you tried to save the robot.”

“I thought he was worth saving. He was a friend of mine.”

“He well might have been worth saving,” said A, “but he used poor judgment. Here we have no place for those who have poor judgment.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re getting at,” said Lansing, angrily. “I don’t like the way you sit in judgment. I don’t like anything about the four of you and I never have.”

“As we go,” said D, “we are getting nowhere. I grant you the privilege of the animosity that you bear us. But we cannot allow petty bickering to sway us from the need to talk with one another.”

“Another thing,” said Lansing. “If the talk promises to be of any length, we do not propose to stand here before you like supplicants before a throne. You at least might have the decency to provide us a place to sit.”

“By all means, sit,” said A. “Drag over a couple of chairs and be comfortable.”

Lansing walked to one side of the room and came back with chairs. The two of them sat down.

The creature that had been sleeping in the basket came strolling across the floor, sniffling as it came. It rubbed affectionately against Mary’s legs and lay down on her feet. It gazed up at her with eyes of liquid friendliness.

“Can this be the Sniffler?” she asked. “It prowled about our campfires, but we never caught a glimpse of it.”

“This is your sniffler,” said C. “There are a number of snifflers; this one was assigned to you.”

“The sniffler watched us?”

“Yes, it watched you.”

“And reported back?”

“Naturally,” said C.

“You watched us every minute,” Lansing said. “You never missed a lick. You knew everything we did. You read us like a book. Would you mind telling me what is going on?”

“Willingly,” said A. “You’ve earned the right to know. By coming here, you have earned the right to know.”

“If you’ll only listen,” said B, “we shall attempt to tell you.”

“We’re listening,” said Mary.

“You know, of course,” said A, “about the multiplicity of worlds, worlds splitting off at crisis points to form still other worlds. And I take it you are acquainted with the evolutionary process.”

“We know of evolution,” Mary said. “A system of sorting out to make possible the selection of the fittest.”

“Exactly. If you think about it, you will see that the splitting off of alternate worlds is an evolutionary process.”

“You mean for the selection of better worlds? Don’t you have some trouble with the definition of a better world?”

“Yes, of course we do. That’s the reason you are here. That’s the reason we have brought many others here. Evolution, as such, does not work. It operates on the basis of the development of dominant life forms. In many cases the survival factors that make for dominance in themselves are faulty. All of them have flaws; many of them carry the seeds of their own destruction.”

“That is true,” said Lansing. “On my own world we have developed a mechanism which enables us, if we wish or blunder into it, to commit racial suicide.”

“The human race, with its intelligence,” said B, “is a life form too finely tuned to be allowed to waste itself — to commit, as you say, racial suicide. It is true, of course, that when, and if, the race dwindles to extinction, a successor will arise, some other life form with a survival factor greater than intelligence. What that factor might be, we cannot imagine. It would not necessarily be superior to intelligence. The trouble with the human race is that it has never given the intelligence it possesses the opportunity to develop to its full potential.”

“You think you have a way to develop that full potential?” Mary asked.

“We hope we have,” said D.

“You have seen this world you now are on,” said A. “You have had the opportunity to guess at some of its accomplishments, at the direction in which its technology was trending.”

“Yes, we have,” said Lansing. “The doors that open on other worlds. A better concept than world-seekers in my world have come up with. Back home we dream of starships. Only dream of them, for they may not be possible. Although, come to think of it, on Jurgens’s world Earth was empty because its people had gone out to the stars.”

“Do you know,” asked C, “if they ever got there?”

“I assume they did,” said Lansing. “But no, I don’t know they did.”

“And there are what you call the translators,” said Mary. “Another way to travel — to travel and to learn. I suppose you could utilize the method to study the entire universe, bring back ideas and concepts the human race might never have dreamed of on its own. Edward and I were only caught on the edges of it. The Brigadier rushed in and was lost. Could you tell us where he went?”

“That we cannot do,” said A. “Used improperly, the method can be dangerous.”

“Yet you leave it open,” Lansing said. “Callously, you leave it open, a trap for unwary visitors.”

“There,” said D, “you have hit exactly on the point. The unwary are eliminated from consideration. In our plan we have no use for those who act as fools.”

“The way you eliminated Sandra at the singing tower and Jurgens on the slopes of Chaos.”

“I sense hostility,” said D.

“You’re damned right you sense hostility. I am hostile. You eliminated four of us.”

“You were lucky,” A told him. “More often than not an entire band is eliminated. But not by anything we do. They are eliminated by the faults within themselves.”

“And the people at the camp? The refugee camp near the singing tower?”

“They are the failures. They gave up. Gave up and ‘hunkered down.’ You two did not give up. That’s why you are here.”

“We’re here,” said Lansing, “because Mary always believed the answer lay within this cube.”

“And by the force of her belief, you solved the riddle of the cube,” said A.

“That’s true,” said Lansing. “Being true, then why am I here? Because I tagged along with Mary?”

“You’re here because, along the way, you made the right decisions.”

“At Chaos I made a wrong decision.”

“We don’t think you did,” said C. “A matter of survival, while important, is not always a correct decision. There are decisions that can ignore survival.”

Sniffler, resting on Mary’s feet, had gone fast asleep.

“You make moral decisions,” said Lansing, angrily. “You’re great decision makers. And with such certainty. Tell me, just who the hell are you? The last survivors of the humans who lived upon this world?”

“No, we’re not,” said A. “We can’t even claim that we are human. Our home is on a planet on the far side of the galaxy.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I don’t know if we can tell you so you’ll understand. There’s no word in your language that adequately expresses what we are. For the want of a better term, you might think of us as social workers.”

“Social workers!” said Lansing. “For the love of Christ! It has come to this. The human race has need of social workers. We’ve sunk so low in the galactic ghetto that we need social workers!”

“I told you,” said A, “that the term was not precise. But consider this: Within the galaxy there are few intelligences that have the potential promise of you humans. Yet, unless something can be done about it, you are headed for extinction — all of you. Even so great a civilization as once existed on this alternate world went down to nothing. Folly brought it down — economic folly, political folly. You, Lansing, must know that if someone presses a button, your world is gone as well. You, Miss Owen, lived on a world that is heading for a great disaster. Someday soon the empires will fall and from the wreckage it will take thousands of years for a new civilization to arise, if it ever does. Even if it does, it may be a worse civilization than the one you know. On all the alternate worlds, disasters loom in one guise or another. The human race got off to a bad start and has not improved. It was doomed from the first beginning. The solution, as we see it, is to recruit a cadre of selected humans from all the many worlds, using them to give the race a new beginning and a second chance.”

“Recruit, you say,” said Lansing. “I don’t call this recruitment. You snatch us from our worlds. You impress us. You bring us here and, telling us nothing, turn us loose, on our own, in this silly testing area of yours, to see how we make out, watching all the time to see how we make out, making judgment on us.”

“Would you have come if we’d asked you? Would you have enlisted?”

“No, I would not have,” said Lansing. “Neither, I think, would Mary.”

“On all the many worlds,” said B, “we have our agents and recruiters. We handpick the humans that we want — the ones we think may have a chance to pass the tests. We don’t take just anyone. We are very choosy. Through the years we have collected some thousands of the humans who have passed the test, the kind of humans we think are best equipped to build the sort of society that such a race should build. We do this because it seems to us that it would be a waste for the galaxy to lose the kind of people that you are. In time, working with other intelligences, you will help to form a galactic society — a society beyond any present imagination. We feel that intelligence may be the crowning glory of fumbling evolution, that nothing better can be found. But if intelligence falls of its own weight, as it is falling, not only here but elsewhere, then evolution will turn, blindly, to some other set of survival factors and the concept of intelligence may be lost forever.”

“Edward,” said Mary, “there may be validity in what he says, in what they’ve done.”

“That well may be,” said Lansing, “but I don’t like the way they go about it.”

“It may be the only way,” said Mary. “As they say, no one would enlist. Those few who possibly might probably would be the very ones for whom they’d have no use.”

“I am glad to see,” said A, “that you are approaching some acceptance of our view.”

“What else,” asked Lansing, sourly, “is left for us to do?”

“Not much,” said B. “If you wish, you still are free to walk out the door into the world you left.”

“That I wouldn’t want,” said Lansing, thinking of the camp of refugees in the river valley. “How about our own—”

He cut off what he had meant to say. If they went back to their own worlds, it would mean that he and Mary could not be together. Groping, he found her hand and clasped it tightly.

“You meant to ask if you could go back to your own worlds,” said D. “I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

“Where we go,” said Mary, “does not matter, so long as Edward and I remain together.”

“Well, then,” said A, “that’s settled. We’re very glad to have you. Whenever you are ready to go, you can walk through the door in the corner to the left. It does not open on the world you just left, but into a brand-new world.”

“Another alternate world?” asked Mary.

“No. It opens on an Earthlike planet very far from here. Looking up at night, you’ll see strange stars and constellations that are unfamiliar. A second chance, we said — a brand-new planet to go with that second chance. There is one city only — actually not a city, but a university town made up almost entirely of the university. There you’ll teach the things you know and sit in classes to study the things you do not know. Perhaps a number of matters you have never heard or thought about. This will go on for many years, probably your entire lifetimes. Finally, perhaps a century or more from now, a highly intellectual and educated group, equipped with more and better tools than any Earth society has had before, quite naturally will begin to formulate a world society. It’s too soon to do so now. There still are many things to learn, many attitudes to absorb and study, many viewpoints to ponder, before that can be done. You’ll be under no economic stress during the training period, although in time it will be necessary for the community to develop an economic system. For the moment everything will be taken care of. All we ask is that you study and give yourself the time to become fully human.”

“In other words,” said Lansing, “you will still be taking care of us.”

“You resent that?”

“I think he does,” said Mary, “but he’ll get over it. Given time, he’ll get over it.”

Lansing rose from his chair, Mary rising with him.

“Which door did you say?” asked Mary.

“That one over there,” A said, pointing.

“One question before we go,” said Lansing. “Tell me, if you will, what Chaos is.”

“On your world,” said D, “you have a Chinese wall.”

“Yes, I would suspect on both Mary’s world and mine.”

“Chaos is a sophisticated Chinese wall,” said D. “An utterly stupid thing to build. It was the last and greatest folly performed by the former people of this planet. It contributed to their downfall. The full story is far too long to tell.”

“I see,” said Lansing, turning toward the door.

“Would you take it badly,” asked A, “if we said you go with all our blessings?”

“Not at all,” said Mary. “We thank you for your kindness and for the second chance.”

They walked to the door, but before they opened it turned to look back. The four still were sitting in a row upon the couch, the white, blind, skull-like faces watching after them.

Then Lansing opened the door and the two of them passed through.

They stood upon a meadow, and in the distance saw the spires and towers of the university, where evening bells were tolling.

Hand in hand they walked toward mankind’s second chance.