“Lad,” said Charley to Kent, “there’s another story to tell the boys. Another yarn about Harry, the Hermit.”
“They won’t believe it,” Kent declared. “They’ll listen and then go out and retell it and make it a little better. And someone else will make it better yet. All we can do, Charley, is to give rise to another, an even greater, Harry, the Hermit.”
Ann, sitting beside her father, smiled at them. “Just a couple of myth-makers,” she said.
Charley studied the terrain beneath them, combed his beard. “You know,” he said, “I still think that bird back there was off his nut. He’ll try makin’ himself into a Ghost—and just be an ordinary Earth kind of ghost. The kind that just ain’t.”
A Ghost suddenly materialized, shimmered faintly in the rocket cabin.
And for the first time known to man, perhaps for the first time in all history, the Ghost spoke, spoke with a voice they all recognized, the voice of the man back in Mad-Man’s, that voice with its old mockery.
“So you think so, do you?” said the Ghost.
Then he faded from their view.
Worlds Without End
“Worlds Without End” was originally published in the winter 1956–1957 issue of Future Science Fiction. At that time, the magazine was edited by Robert W. Lowndes, who had been purchasing stories from Clifford D. Simak since World War II. However, Lowndes, was not Cliff’s preferred editor; John W. Campbell Jr., who ran Astounding Science Fiction, had that distinction before the war and then Horace Gold, who created Galaxy Magazine. But Lowndes was the one who got this story about the corruption of a long-established organization.
She did not look like the kind of person who would want to take the Dream. Although, Norman Blaine reflected, one could never tell.
He wrote the name she had given him down on the scratch pad, instead of putting it on the application blank, he wrote it slowly, deliberately, to give himself time to think, for there was something here that was puzzling.
Lucinda Silone.
Peculiar name, he thought. Not like a real name. More like a stage name taken to cover up plain Susan Brown, or ordinary Betty Smith, or some other common run of name.
He wrote it slowly so that he could think, but he couldn’t think too well. There were too many other things cluttering up his brain: The shakeup rumor that had whispered its way for days back and forth within the Center, his own connection with that rumor, and the advice that had been given him—there was something funny about the job. The advice was: don’t trust Farris (as if he needed that advice!)—look it over well if it is offered you. It was all kindly-meant advice, but not very helpful.
And there was the lapel-clinging Buttonholer who had caught him in the parking lot that morning and had clung onto him when he tried to push him off; there was Harriet Marsh, with whom he had a date this very night.
Now, finally, this woman across the desk from him.
Although it was foolish, Blaine told himself—to think a thing like that, to tie her up with all the other thoughts that were bumping together like driftwood in his brain. For there could be no connection—there simply couldn’t be.
She was Lucinda Silone, she’d said. Something about the name and something, as well, about the way she said it—the little lilting tones meant consciously to give it grace and make it sparkle—set tiny alarm bells ringing in his brain.
“You’re with Entertainment.” He said it casually, very much off-hand; this was a trick question and one that must be rightly put.
“Why, no,” she replied, “I’m not.”
Listening to the way she said it, Blaine could find nothing wrong. Her voice held a touch of fluttery happiness that betrayed pleasure at his thinking she must be Entertainment. And that was just as it should be. It was exactly the way that most of the others answered—flattered at the implication that they belonged to the fabulous Entertainment guild.
He gave her her money’s worth. “I would have guessed you were.”
He looked directly at Lucinda Silone, watching the expression on her face, but seeing all the other good points, too. “We get good at judging people here,” he said. “We aren’t often wrong.”
She didn’t wince. There was no reaction—no start of guilt, no flutter of confusion.
Her hair was honey color, her eyes were china blue, and her skin so milky white that one looked a second time to make sure that it was real.
We don’t get many like this one, thought Blaine. The old and sick and the disappointed. The desperate ones and those who know frustration.
“You’re mistaken, Mr. Blaine,” she said. “I am Education.”
He wrote Education on the scratch pad, and said, “It may have been the name. It’s a very good name. Easy to say. Musical. It would go well on the stage.”
He looked up from the pad and said, smiling—making himself smile against the inexplicable tension that was rising in him: “Although it was not the name alone; I am sure of that.”
She didn’t smile and he wondered swiftly if he had been awkward. He snapped the words he’d said in quick review across his mind and decided that he’d not been awkward. When you were director of Fabrication, you were not an awkward man. You knew how to handle people; you had to know how to handle them. And you knew, as well, how to handle yourself—how to make your face say one thing while your mind might be thinking something else.
No, his words had been a compliment, and not too badly put. She should have smiled. That she had failed to smile might mean something—or it mightn’t mean a thing, except that she was clever. Norman Blaine had no doubt that Lucinda Silone was clever, and as cool a customer as he had ever seen.
Although coolness in itself was not too unusual. You got the cool ones, too—the cool and calculating—the ones who had figured it all out well ahead of time and knew what they were doing. And there were others, too, who had cut off all retreat behind them.
“You wish a Sleep,” he said.
She nodded.
“And a Dream?”
“And a Dream,” she said.
“You’ve thought it out quite thoroughly, I suppose. You wouldn’t come, of course, if you had any doubts.”
“I’ve thought it through,” she told him, “and I have no doubts.”
“You still have time. You’ll have time to change your mind up to the final moment. We’re most anxious that you get that fact fixed firmly in your mind.”
“I’ll not change my mind,” she said.
“We still prefer to assume you may. We do not try to change your mind, but we insist upon complete understanding upon your part that a change is possible. You are under no obligation to us. No matter how far we’ve gone, there still is no obligation. The Dream may have been fabricated and processed; you may have paid your fee; you may already have entered the receptacle—there’s still time to change your mind. The Dream will then be destroyed, your fee will be returned, and the record will be expunged. So far as we are then concerned, we will have never seen you.”
“I quite understand,” she said.
He nodded quietly. “We’ll proceed on that understanding.”
He picked up his pencil and wrote her name and classification on the application blank. “Age?”