“There might be,” said Information, “certain services that, from time to time, you might be willing to perform. Nothing strenuous, of course, and not required, you understand. If you would be willing to perform them, we would be the ones who would stand in debt. But the house is yours no matter what you may elect to do.”
“Services?” asked Gray. “There are few services, I am afraid, that I could perform.”
“It does not really matter,” Information told him. “We are very glad you called. Call us again any time you wish.”
The connection clicked and he was left, standing foolishly with the receiver in his hand.
He put it back into the cradle and went to the living room, sitting in the chair he’d sat in when he’d found his way into the house the night before.
While he’d been busy in the hall with the telephone, someone—or something, or some strange procedure—had laid wood in the fireplace and had lit it and the brass wood carrier that stood beside the hearth was filled with other wood against the need of it.
He watched the fire creeping up the logs, flickering as it climbed, with the cold wind outside growling in the chimney.
An Old Folks’ Home, he thought.
For if he’d heard aright, that was what it was.
And a better one, by far, than the one he had planned to enter.
There was no reason in the world why anyone should give this house to him. He had done nothing he could think of that entitled him to have it.
An Old Folks’ Home, all to himself, and on his favorite trout stream.
It would be wonderful, he thought, if he only could accept it.
He hitched the chair around so he could face the fire. He had always liked a fire.
Such a pleasant place, he thought, and such thoughtful service. He wished that he could stay.
And what was there to stop him? No one would mind if he did not return. In a day or two he could make his way out to Pineview and mail a couple of letters that would fix it so no one would hunt for him.
But it was madness, he thought. What if he got sick? What if he fell and hurt himself? He could not reach a doctor and there would be no one to help him.
Then he thought of how he’d hunted for an aspirin and there had been no aspirin. And how he’d crawled into bed with a twisted, swollen ankle that had been all right when he got up in the morning.
He had no worry, he realized, about ever being sick.
There had been no aspirin tablet because there had been no need of any.
This house was not a house alone. It was more than just a house. It was a shelter and a servant and a doctor. It was a safe and antiseptic house and it was compassionate.
It gave you everything you wanted. It fulfilled your every need. It gave you fire and food and comfort and a sense of being cared for.
There were the books, he thought. The rows and stacks of books, the very kind of books by which he’d lived for years.
Dr. Frederick Gray, dean of the school of law. Filled with honor and importance until he got too old, until his wife and son had died and all his friends were gone or incapacitated. Now no longer dean, now no longer scholar, but an old man with a name that was buried in the past.
He rose slowly from the chair and went into the study. He put out his hand and rubbed the palm of it along the leathery spines of a row of books.
These were the friends, he told himself, the friends a man could count on. They always were in place and waiting for the time a man might need them.
He stopped in front of the section that had puzzled him at first, which he had thought of as a farfetched joke. But now he knew there was no joke.
He read the titles of a few of them: “Basic Statutes of Arcturus XXIV,” “Comparison of the Legal Concepts of the Centaurian Systems,” “Jurisprudence on Zubeneschamali III, VI and VII,” “The Practical Law of Canopus XII.” And many others with the strange names in their titles.
Perhaps, he thought, he would not have recognized the names so readily had it not been for Ben. For years he had listened to him talk about his work, reeling off many of these very names as if they might be places no farther off than just down the street a ways.
And maybe, thought Frederick Gray, they were not so far, at that. All he had to do to talk to men—no, not men, perhaps, but beings—in all of these strange places was to walk out into the hall and dial their numbers on the phone.
A telephone directory, he thought, with numbers for the stars, and on all these shelves law books from the stars.
Perhaps there were, on those other solar systems, nothing like a telephone or a telephone directory; perhaps, on those other planets there weren’t any law books. But here on Earth, he told himself, the means of communication had to be a telephone, the means of information books upon the shelf. For all of it had to be a matter of translation, twisting the unfamiliar into something that was familiar and that one could use. And translation not for Earth alone, but for all those other beings on all those other planets. On each of a dozen planets there might be a different means of communication, but in the case of a call to him from any of those planets, no matter what means the creature of the planet might employ, the telephone would ring.
And the names of those other stars would be translations, too. For the creatures who lived upon the planets circling Polaris would not call their sun Polaris. But here on Earth it had to be Polaris, for that was the only way a human had to identify the star.
The language would have to be translated, too. The creatures he had talked with on the phone could not have spoken English, and yet it had been English when it had reached his ear. And his replies, he knew, must have reached that other party in some language other than the tongue that he had used.
He stood aghast at the very thought of it, wondering how he could abide such an explanation. And yet there was no choice. It was the only explanation that would fit the situation.
Somewhere a bell rang sharply and he turned from the shelves of books.
He waited for it to ring again, but it did not ring.
He walked into the living room and saw that dinner had been set upon the table and was waiting for him.
So that was what it had been, he thought. A bell to summon him to dinner.
After dinner, he went back to the living room to sit before the fire and fight the whole thing out. He assembled the facts and evidence in his old lawyer’s mind and gave full consideration to all possibilities.
He touched the edge of wonder and shoved it to one side, he erased it carefully—for in his consideration of this house there was no room for wonder and no place for magic.
Was it no more than illusion? That was the first question one must ask. Was this really happening, or was he just imagining that it was happening? Was he, perhaps, in all reality, sitting underneath a tree or squatting on the river bank, mumbling at nothing, scratching symbols in the dirt with his fingernails, and living the fantasy of this house, this fire, this room?
It was hard to believe that this might be the case. For there were too many details. Imagination formed a hazy framework and let it go at that.
There were here too many details and there was no haziness and he could move and think of his own volition; he still was the master of himself.
And if it were not imagination, if he could rule out insanity, then this house and all that happened must be, indeed, the truth. And if it were the truth, then here was a house built or shaped or somehow put into being by some outside agency that was as yet unsuspected in the mind of humankind.
But, he asked himself, why would they want to do it? What could be the motive?
With a view, perhaps, of studying him as a representative specimen of the creature, Man? Or with the idea that somehow they could make some use of him?