Webster's eyes strayed to another plate, Mary Webster, the mother of the boy here at his side. And yet not a boy. He kept forgetting that Thomas was twenty now, in a week or so would be leaving for Mars, even as in his younger days he, too, had gone to Mars.
All here together, he told himself. The Websters and their wives and children. Here in death together as they had lived together, sleeping in the pride and security of bronze and marble with the pines outside and the symbolic figure above the age-greened door.
The robots were waiting, standing silently, their task fulfilled.
His mother looked at him.
"You're head of the family now, my son," she told him.
He reached out and hugged her close against his side. Head of the family — what was left of it. Just the three of them now. His mother and his son. And his son would be leaving soon, going out to Mars. But he would come back. Come back with a wife, perhaps, and the family would go on. The family wouldn't stay at three. Most of the big house wouldn't stay closed off, as it now was closed off. There had been a time when it had rung with the life of a dozen units of the family, living in their separate apartments under one big roof. That time, he knew, would come again.
The three of them turned and left the crypt, took the path back to the house, looming like a huge grey shadow in the mist.
***
A fire blazed in the hearth and the book lay upon his desk. Jerome A. Webster reached out and picked it up, read the title once again:
Martian Physiology, With Especial Reference to the Brain, by Jerome A. Webster, M.D.
Thick and authoritative — the work of a lifetime. Standing almost alone in its field. Based upon the data gathered during those five plague years on Mars — years when he had laboured almost day and night with his fellow colleagues of the World Committee's medical commission, dispatched on an errand of mercy to the neighbouring planet.
A tap sounded on the door.
"Come in," he called.
The door opened and a robot glided in.
"Your whisky, sir."
"Thank you, Jenkins," Webster said.
"The minister, sir," said Jenkins, "has left."
"Oh, yes. I presume that you took care of him."
"I did, sir. Gave him the usual fee and offered him a drink. He refused the drink."
"That was a social error," Webster told him. "Ministers don't drink."
"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know. He asked me to ask you to come to church sometime."
"I told him, sir, that you never went anywhere."
"That was quite right, Jenkins," said Webster. "None of us ever go anywhere."
Jenkins headed for the door, stopped before he got there, turned around. "If I may say so, sir, that was a touching service at the crypt. Your father was a fine human, the finest ever was. The robots were saying the service was very fitting. Dignified like, sir. He would have liked it had he known."
"My father," said Webster, "would be even more pleased to hear you say that, Jenkins."
"Thank you, sir," said Jenkins, and went out.
Webster sat with the whisky and the book and the fire — felt the comfort of the well-known room close in about him, felt the refuge that was in it.
This was home. It had been home for the Websters since that day when the first John J. had come here and built the first unit of the sprawling house. John J. had chosen it because it had a trout stream, or so he always said. But it was something more than that. It must have been, Webster told himself, something more than that.
Perhaps, at first, it had only been the trout stream. The trout stream and the trees and meadows, the rocky ridge where the mist drifted in each morning from the river. Maybe the rest of it had grown, grown gradually through the years, through years of family association until the very soil was soaked with something that approached, but wasn't quite, tradition. Something that made each tree, each rock, each foot of soil a Webster tree or rock or clod of soil. It all belonged.
John J., the first John J., had come after the break-up of the cities, after men had forsaken, once and for all, the twentieth century huddling places, had broken free of the tribal instinct to stick together in one cave or in one clearing against a common foe or a common fear. An instinct that had become outmoded, for there were no fears or foes. Man revolting against the herd instinct economic and social conditions had impressed upon him in ages past. A new security and a new sufficiency had made it possible to break away.
The trend had started back in the twentieth century, more than two hundred years before, when men moved to country homes to get fresh air and elbow room and a graciousness in life that communal existence, in its strictest sense, never had given them.
And here was the end result. A quiet living. A peace that could only come with good things. The sort of life that men had yearned for years to have. A manorial existence, based on old family homes and leisurely acres, with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs.
Webster smiled at the fireplace with its blazing wood. That was an anachronism, but a good one — something that Man had brought forward from the caves. Useless, because atomic heating was better — but more pleasant. One couldn't sit and watch atomics and dream and build castles in the flames.
Even the crypt out there, where they had put his father that afternoon. That was family, too. All of a piece with the rest of it. The sombre pride and leisured life and peace. In the old days the dead were buried in vast plots all together, stranger cheek by jowl with stranger He never goes anywhere.
That is what Jenkins had, told the minister.
And that was right. For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone one wished, could go, by sense, if not in body, anywhere one wished. Could attend the theatre or hear a concert or browse in a library half-way around the world. Could transact any business one might need to transact without rising from one's chair.
Webster drank the whisky, then swung to the dialled machine beside his desk.
He spun dials from memory without resorting to the log. He knew where he was going.
His finger flipped a toggle and the room melted away — or seemed to melt. There was left the chair within which he sat, part of the desk, part of the machine itself and that was all.
The chair was on a hillside swept with golden grass and dotted with scraggly, wind-twisted trees, a hillside that straggled down to a lake nestling in the grip of purple mountain spurs. The spurs, darkened in long streaks with the bluish-greens of distant pine, climbed in staggering stairs, melting into the blue-tinged snow-capped peaks that reared beyond and above them in jagged saw-toothed outline.
The wind talked harshly in the crouching trees and ripped the long grass in sudden gusts. The last rays of the sun struck fire from the distant peaks.
Solitude and grandeur, the long sweep of tumbled land, the cuddled lake, the knife-like shadows on the far-off ranges.
Webster sat easily in his chair, eyes squinting at the peaks.
A voice said almost at his shoulder: "May I come in?"
A soft, sibilant voice, wholly unhuman. But one that Webster knew.
He nodded his head. "By all means, Juwain." He turned slightly and saw the elaborate crouching pedestal, the furry, soft-eyed figure of the Martian squatting on it. Other alien furniture loomed indistinctly beyond the pedestal, half guessed furniture from that dwelling out on Mars.