Once the house was built, said Andrews, Simmons had some daughters running around his place that Vickers might want to have a look at, although you could do your picking blind if you wanted to, for they were a likely lot. Andrews had dug Vickers in the ribs with his elbow and had laughed uproariously and Jean, Andrews' wife, who had come out to sit with them a while, had smiled shyly at him and then had turned to watch the children playing in the yard.
After supper, Andrews had showed him with some pride the books on the shelf in the living room and had said that he was reading them, something he had never done before — something he had never wanted to do before, nor had the time to do. Vickers, looking at the books, had found Homer and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Austen, Thoreau and Steinbeck.
"You mean you're reading these?" he asked.
Andrews had nodded. "Reading them and liking them, mostly. Once in a while I find it a little hard to wade through them, but I keep reading on. Jean likes Austen best."
It was a good life here, said Andrews, the best life they'd ever known and Jean smiled her agreement and the kids had lost an argument about letting the dogs come in and sleep the night with them.
It _was_ a good life, Vickers silently agreed. Here again was the old American frontier, idealized and bookish, with all the frontier's advantages and none of its terror and its hardship. Here was a paternal feudalism, with the Big House on the hill the castle that looked down across the fields where happy people lived and took their living from the soil. Here was a time for resting and for gathering strength. And here was peace. Here there was no talk of war, no taxes to fight a war, or to prevent a war by a proved willingness to fight.
Here was — what had Andrews said? — the pastoral-feudal stage. And after that came what stage? The pastoral-feudal stage for resting and thinking, for getting thoughts in order, for establishing once again the common touch between Man and soil, the stage in which was prepared the way for the development of a culture that would be better than the one they had left.
This was one earth of many earths. How many others followed close behind: hundreds, millions? Earth following earth, and now all the earths lay open.
He tried to figure it out and he thought he saw the pattern that the mutants planned. It was simple and it was brutal, but it was workable.
There was an Earth that was a failure. Somewhere, on the long path that led up from apedom, they had taken the wrong turning and had travelled since that day a long road of misery. There was brilliance in these people, and goodness, and ability — but they had turned their brilliance and their ability into channels of hate and arrogance and their goodness had been buried in selfishness.
They were good people and were worth the saving, as a drunkard or a criminal is worthy of rehabilitation. But to save them, you must get them out of the neighborhood they live in, out of the slums of human thought and method. There could be no other way of giving them the opportunity to break themselves of old habits, of the ingrown habits of generation after generation of hate and greed and killing.
To do this, you must break the world they live in and you must have a plan to break it and after it is broken, you must have a program that leads to a better world.
But first of all, there must be a plan of action.
First you shattered the economic system on which old Earth was built. You shattered it with Forever cars and everlasting razor blades and with synthetic carbohydrates that would feed the hungry. You destroyed industry by producing, once and for all, things that industry could not duplicate and things that made industry obsolete and when you shattered industry to a certain point, war was impossible and half the job was done. But that left people without jobs, so you fed them with carbohydrates while you tried to funnel them to the following earths that lay waiting for them. If there wasn't room enough on Earth Number Two, you sent some of them to Number Three and maybe Number Four, so that you had no crowding, so there was room enough for all. On the new earths there was a beginning again, a chance to dodge the errors and skirt the dangers that had bathed Old Earth in blood for countless centuries.
On these new earths you could build any sort of culture that you wished. You could even experiment a little, aim at one culture on the Second Earth and a slightly different one on Number Three and yet a different one on Four. And after a thousand years or so you could compare these cultures and see which one was best and consult the bales of data you had kept and pinpoint each mistake in each particular culture. In time you could arrive at a formula for the best in human cultures.
Here on this earth, the pastoral-feudal culture was the first step only. It was a resting place, a place for education and for settling down. Things would change or be changed. The sons of the man in whose house he lay would build a better house and probably would have robots to work his fields and make his living, while he himself would live a leisured life and out of a leisured people, with their energies channeled by good leadership, would come paradise on earth — or on many earths.
There had been that article in the paper he had read on that morning — was it only days ago? — which had said that the authorities were alarmed at mass disappearances. Whole families, the article had said, were dropping out of sight for no apparent reason and with no apparent thing in common except abject poverty. And, of course, it would be the ones in abject poverty who would be taken first — the homeless and the jobless and the sick — to be settled on these earths that followed in the track of the dark and bloody Earth inhabited by Man.
Soon there would be little more than a handful of people on the dark and bloody Earth. Soon, in a thousand years or less, it would go tumbling on its way alone, its hide cleansed of the ravening tribe which had eaten at it and gutted it and mangled it and ravished it — and this same tribe would be established on other earths, under better guidance, to create for themselves a life that would be a better life.
Beautiful, he thought. Beautiful — and yet, there was this matter of the androids.
Begin at the beginning, he told himself. Start with first facts, try to see the logic of it, to figure out the course of mutancy.
There always had been mutants. If there had not been, Man would still be a little skittering creature hiding in the jungle, taking to the trees, terrified and skulking.
There had been the mutation of the opposable thumb. There had been mutations within the little brain that made for creature cunning. Some mutation, unrecorded, had captured fire and tamed it. Another mutation had evolved the wheel. Still another had invented the bow and arrow. And so it went, on down the ages. Mutation on mutation, building the ladder that mankind climbed.
Except that the creature who had captured and tamed the flame did not know he was a mutant. And neither had the tribesman who had thought up the wheel, nor the first bowman.
Down through the ages there had been unsuspected and unsuspecting mutants — men who were successful beyond the success of others, great business figures or great statesmen, great writers, great artists, men who stood so far above the herd of their fellow men that they had seemed giants in comparison.
Perhaps not all of them were mutants, though most of them must have been. But their mutancy would have been a crippled thing in comparison with what it could have been, for they were forced to limit themselves, forced to conform to the social and economic pattern set by a non-mutant society. That they had been able to conform, that they had been able to fit themselves to a smaller measure than their normal stature, that they had been able to get along with men who were less than they and still stand out as men of towering ability was in itself a measure of their mutancy.