Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (11 page)

"I would appreciate it if you stopped raving and told me—"

"Your house... your Cape Cod cottage! It's perfect."

"My
what
?" Paul Marquis spun around.

Esther slid the right-hand door back into its slot and stepped delicately onto the mud. "I'll bet you have it half furnished, too. And full of the crazy domestic gimmicks you're always working out. Downy old duck, aren't you? 'Come on, Es, I want to ask your advice on where to stick a house on that land I bought!' So go on and smirk: don't worry, I won't have the gall to say I knew it all the time."

Marquis watched the progress of her feminized blue jeans up the bush-infested hill toward the green and white cottage with anything but a smirk.

Finally, he swung madly over the side, slipped headlong into the mud, picked himself up and clambered on, dripping great brown chunks of Canadian soil as he thudded up the slope.

Esther nodded at him as he approached, her hand truculent on the long, old-fashioned doorknob. "What's the sense of locking doors in this wilderness? If anyone were going to burglarize, they could smash a window quite easily and help themselves while you were away. Well, don't stand there looking philosophical—make with the key, make with the key!"

"The... the key." Dazed, he took a small key chain out of his pocket, looked at it for a moment, then shoved it back violently. He ran a hand through a tangle of blond hair and leaned against the door. It opened.

The bacteriologist trotted past him as he clawed at the post to retain his balance. "Never could get the hang of those prehistoric gadgets. Photoelectric cells will be good enough for my children, and they're good enough for me. Oh, Paul! Don't tell me your sense for the fitness of things extends no further than atomic nuclei. Look at that furniture!"

"Furniture?" he asked very weakly. Slowly, he opened eyes which had been tightly closed while he leaned against the door. He took in the roomful of chairs and tables done in the sprouting-from-one-center-leg style which was currently popular. "Furniture!" he sighed and carefully closed his eyes again.

Esther Sakarian shook her sober head with assurance. "New Single-Support just doesn't go in a Cape Cod cottage. Believe me, Paul, your poetic soul may want to placate your scientific mind by giving it superfunctional surroundings, but you can't do it in this kind of a house. Furthermore, just by looking at that retouched picture of Caroline you have pasted to your Geiger counter, I know she wouldn't approve. You'll have to get rid of at least—"

He had come up to her side and stood plucking the sleeve of her bright plaid shirt. "Esther," he muttered, "my dear, sweet, talkative, analytical, self-confident Esther—please sit down and shut up!"

She dropped into a roundly curved seat, staring at him from angled eyebrows. "You have a point to make?"

"I have a point to make!" Paul told her emphatically. He waved wildly at the modern furniture which seemed to be talking slang in the pleasant, leisurely room. "All this, the house, the furniture, the accessories, was not only not built nor sent here by me, but... but wasn't here a week ago when I came out with the man from the land office and bought the property. It shouldn't be here!"

"Nonsense! It couldn't just—" She broke off.

He nodded. "It did just. But that only makes me
feel
crazy. What makes me positively impatient for a jacket laced securely up the back is the furniture. It's the kind of furniture I thought of whenever Caroline talked about building this cottage. But the point is this: I knew she wanted to stuff it full of New England antique, and—since I feel a woman's place is in the home—I never argued the point. I never mentioned buying Single-Support to her; I've never mentioned the idea to anyone. And every chair and table in this room is exactly what I thought it should be—
privately
!"

Esther had been listening to him with an expanding frown. Now she started an uneasy giggle, and cut it off before it began to throb. "Paul, I know you're too neurotic to be insane, and I'm willing to admit my leg isn't pretty enough for you to pull. But this... this—Look, the house may have been dropped by a passing plane; or possibly Charles Fort had the right idea. What you're trying to tell me about the furniture, though—It makes for belly butterflies!"

"Mine have electric fans on their wings," he assured her. "Now let's try to stay calm. Let's hold hands and go into the kitchen. If there's a certain refrigerator-sink-stove combination—"

There was. Paul Marquis gripped the sleek enamel and whistled "The Pilgrim's Chorus" through his teeth.

"I will a-ask you to c-consider this f-fact," he said at last, shakenly. "This particular rig is one which I worked out on the back of an envelope from Caroline at three-fifteen yesterday when the big dredge got kinked up and I had nothing else to do. Prior to that time, all I knew was that I wanted something slightly different in the way of an all-in-one kitchen unit. This is what I drew."

Esther patted the sides of her face as if she were trying to slap herself back into sanity ever so gently. "Yes, I know."

"You do?"

"You may not remember, Mr. Marquis, but you showed me the drawing in the mess hall at supper. Since it was too fantastically expensive to be considered seriously, I suggested shaping the refrigerator like a sphere so that it would fit into the curve of the stove. You chucked out your lower lip and agreed. The refrigerator is shaped like a sphere and fits into the curve of the stove."

Paul opened a cupboard and pulled out a rainbow-splashed tumbler. "I'm going to get a drink, even if it's water!"

He held the tumbler under the projecting faucet and reached for a button marked "cold." Before his questing finger pressed it, however, a stream of ice-cold fluid spurted out of the faucet, filled the glass and stopped without a trickle.

The physicist exhaled at the completely dry bottom surface of the sink. He tightened his fingers convulsively on the tumbler and poured its contents down his throat. A moment passed, while his head was thrown back; then Esther, who had been leaning against the smooth wall, saw him begin to gag. She reached his side just as the coughs died away and the tears started to leak out of his eyes.

"Whoo-
oof
?" he explained. "That was whisky—the finest Scotch ever to pass these tired old lips. Just as it started to pour, I thought to myself: 'What you need, friend, is a good swift slug of Scotch.' And Esther—that's what that water was! Talk about miracles!"

"I don't like this," the brown-haired woman decided positively. She pulled a small glass vial from a breast pocket. "Whisky, water or whatever it is—I'm going to get a sample and analyze it. You've no idea how many varieties of algae I've seen in the water up here. I think the presence of radioactive ore—Hullo. It doesn't work."

With thumb and forefinger, she pressed the hot and cold water buttons until the flesh under her fingernails turned white. The faucet remained impassively dry.

Paul came over and bent his head under the metal arm. He straightened and smiled impishly. "Pour, water!" he commanded. Again water spat from the faucet, this time describing a curve to where Esther Sakarian had moved the vial to permit her companion to examine the plumbing. When the vial was full, the water stopped.

"Yup!" Paul grinned at the gasping bacteriologist. "Those buttons, the drain—they're only for display. This house does exactly what's required of it—but only when
I
require it! I have a robot house here, Es, and it's mine,
all
mine!"

She closed the vial and replaced it in her pocket. "I think it's a little more than that. Let's get out of here, Paul. Outside of the obvious impossibility of this whole business, there are a couple of things that don't check. I'd like to have Connor Kuntz up here to go over the place. Besides, we'd better get started if we're to make Little Fermi before the sun goes down."

"You don't tell Kuntz about this," Paul warned her as they moved toward the already opening door. "I don't want him fussing up my robot house."

Esther shrugged. "I won't, if you insist. But Doc Kuntz might give you a line on exactly what you have here. Hit him with the extraordinary and he'll bring five thousand years of scientific banalities to bear on it. Tell me, do you notice any other change in your land since you were here last?"

The physicist stood just outside the door and swept his eyes over the tangle of bush that seasoned the glinting patches of swamp and out-cropped rock. Sick orange from the beginning sunset colored the land weirdly, making the desolate subarctic plains look like the backdrop to a dying age. A young, cold wind sprang up and hurried at them, delighting in its own vigor.

"Well, over there for example. A patch of green grass extending for about a quarter mile. I remember thinking how much like a newly mowed lawn it looked, and how out of place it was in the middle of all this marsh. Over there, where you now see that stretch of absolutely blank brown soil. Of course, it could have withered and died in a week. Winter's coming on."

"Hm-m-m." She stepped back and looked up at the green roof of the cottage which harmonized so unostentatiously with the green shutters and door and the sturdy white of the walls. "Do you think—"

Paul leaped away from the door and stood rubbing his shoulder. He giggled awkwardly. "Seemed as if the post reached over and began rubbing against me. Didn't frighten me exactly—just sort of startling."

He smiled. "I'd say this robot whatever-it-is likes me. Almost a mechanical caress."

Esther nodded, her lips set, but said nothing until they were in the car again. "You know, Paul," she whispered as they got under way, "I have the intriguing thought that this house of yours isn't a robot at all. I think it's thoroughly alive."

He widened his eyes at her. Then he pushed his glasses hard against his forehead and chuckled. "Well, that's what they say, Es: It takes a livin' heap to make a house a home!"

They rode on silently in the seeping darkness, trying to develop reasons and causes, but finding none. It was only when they clattered onto the concrete outskirts of Little Fermi that Paul started abruptly: "I'm going to get some beans and coffee and spend the night in my living house. Breckinbridge won't need me until that shipment of cadmium rods comes in from Edmonton; that means I can spend tonight and all day tomorrow finding out just what I've got."

His companion started to object, then tossed her head. "I can't stop you. But be careful, or poor Caroline may have to marry a young buck from the Harvard Law School."

"Don't worry," he boasted. "I'm pretty sure I can make that house jump through hoops if I ask it. And maybe, if I get bored, I'll ask it!"

He looked up Breckinbridge in the clapboard barracks and got a day's leave of absence from him. Then there was a discussion with the cooks, who were rapidly persuaded to part with miscellaneous packaged foodstuffs. A hurriedly composed telegram to Caroline Hart of Boston, Massachusetts, and he was thumping his way back to the house behind headlights that were willing to split the darkness but were carefully noncommittal about the road.

It wasn't till Paul saw the house clutching the top of the hill that he realized how easily he would have accepted the fact of its disappearance.

Parking the runabout on the slope so that its lights illumined the way to the top, he pushed the side back and prepared to get out.

The door of the house opened. A dark carpet spilled out and humped down the hill to his feet. Regular, sharp protuberances along its length made it a perfect staircase. A definite rosy glow exuded from the protuberances, lighting his way.

"That's
really
rolling out the welcome mat," Paul commented as he locked the ignition in the car and started up.

He couldn't help jumping a bit when, passing through the vestibule, the walls bulged out slightly and touched him gently on either side. But there was such an impression of friendliness in the gesture and they moved back in place so swiftly that there was no logical reason for nervousness.

The dining-room table seemed to reach up slightly to receive the gear he dropped upon it. He patted it and headed for the kitchen.

Water still changed into whisky at his unspoken whim; as he desired, it also changed into onion soup, tomato juice and Napoleon brandy. The refrigerator, he found, was full of everything he might want, from five or six raw tenderloins to three bottles of dark beer complete with the brand name he usually asked for when shopping for himself.

The sight of the food made him hungry; he had missed supper. A steak suffocating under heaps of onions, surrounded by beans and washed down with plenty of hot coffee was an interesting thought. He started for the dining room to collect his gear.

His haversack still rested on the near side of the table. On the far side... On the far side, there reposed a platter containing a thick steak which supported a huge mound of onions and held an encircling brown mass of beans at one corner. Gleaming silverware lay between the platter and a veritable vase of coffee.

Paul found himself giggling hysterically and shook fear-wisps out of his head. Everything was obviously channeled for his comfort. Might as well pull up a chair and start eating. He looked around for one, in time to see a chair come gliding across the floor; it poked him delicately behind the knees and he sat down. The chair continued to the appointed position at the table.

It was while he was spooning away the last of the melon he had imagined into existence for dessert—it had been exuded, complete with dish, from the table top—that he noticed the lighting fixtures were also mere decorative devices. Light came from the walls—or the ceiling—or the floor; it was omnipresent in the house at just the right intensity—and that was all.

The dirty dishes and used silverware vanished into the table like sugar dissolving into hot solution.

Before he went up to bed, he decided to look in at the library. Surely, he had originally imagined a library? He decided he couldn't be certain, and thought one up next to the living room.

All the books he had ever enjoyed were in the warm little space. He spent a contented hour browsing from Aiken to Einstein, until he hit the beautifully bound Britannica. The first volume of the Encyclopedia he opened made him understand the limitations of his establishment.