Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (12 page)

The articles he had read completely were complete, those he had read in part showed only the sections he had touched. For the rest, there was a curious blur of not-quite print which puzzled him until he realized that this was just the picture the eyes retained while the pages of a book were flipped before it.

He climbed the narrow stairs to bed.

Yawningly tired, he noted vaguely that the bed was just the width he had always wanted. As fast as he dropped his clothes to the bedside chair, they were shaken off and pushed along a writhing strip of floor to the corner closet where he imagined they were hung neatly.

He lay down finally, repressing a shudder as the sheets curled up and over him of their own accord. Just before he fell asleep, he remembered he'd spent the largest parts of the past three nights playing chess and was likely to oversleep. He'd intended to rise early and examine his delightfully subservient property in detail, but since he hadn't thought to bring an alarm clock—

Did that matter?

He raised himself on one elbow, the sheet still hugging his chest. "Listen, you," he told the opposite wall sternly. "Wake me exactly eight hours from now. And do it pleasantly, understand?"

—|—

Wakefulness came with a sense of horror that nibbled at his mind. He lay still, wondering what had shocked him so.

"Paul, darling, please wake up. Paul, darling, please wake up. Paul, darling, please—"

Caroline's voice! He leaped out of bed and looked around crazily. What was Caroline doing here? The telegram he'd sent asking her to come up and look at their new house had probably not arrived until breakfast. Even a plane—

Then he remembered. Of course! He patted the bed. "Nice job. Couldn't have done better myself." The headboard curled against his hand and the walls vibrated with a humming noise that was astonishingly like a baritone purr.

The shower, he decided, must have been one of those brilliant yearning concepts he had once entertained for a second or two and then forgotten. It was merely a matter of stepping into a roomy cubicle dotted with multitudes of tiny holes and being sprayed with warm lather which stopped the moment he was soaped up and was succeeded by plain water at the same temperature. As the lather washed away, needle jets of air dried him completely.

He stepped out of the shower to find his clothes hung outside, excellently pressed and smelling faintly of laundry. He was surprised at the laundry odor, although he liked it; but then again that's why there was an odor—
because
he liked it!

It was going to be an unusually fine day, he noted, after suggesting to the bathroom window that it open—unfortunate that he hadn't brought any light clothes with him. Then, as his eyes glanced regretfully downward, he observed he was now wearing a sports shirt and summer slacks.

Evidently his own soiled clothes had been absorbed into the economy of the house and duplicates provided which had the pleasantly adaptive facilities of their source.

The hearts-of-palm breakfast he had worked out while strolling downstairs was ready for him in the dining room. The copy of Jane Austen's
Emma
he'd been rereading recently at mealtime lay beside it open to the correct place.

He sighed happily. "All I need now is a little Mozart played softly."

So, a little Mozart—

—|—

Connor Kuntz's helicopter lazed down out of the mild sky at four o'clock that afternoon. Paul thought the house into a Bunk Johnson trumpet solo and sauntered out to greet his guests.

Esther Sakarian was out of the plane first. She wore a severe black dress that made her look unusually feminine and much less of a laboratory type. "Sorry about bringing Doc Kuntz, Paul. But for all I knew you might need a medic after a night in this place. And I don't have a copter of my own. He offered to give me a lift."

"Perfectly all right," he told her magnanimously. "I'm ready to discuss the house with Kuntz or any other biologist."

She held up a yellow sheet. "For you. Just came."

He read the telegram and winced.

"Anything important?" Esther inquired, temporarily looking away from a pink cloud which seemed to have been fascinating her.

"Oh." He crumpled the sheet and bounced it gloomily on his open palm. "Caroline. Says she's surprised to discover I intended to make my permanent home up here. Says if I'm serious about it, I'd better reconsider our engagement."

Esther pursed her lips. "Well, it is a nice long haul from Boston. And allowing that your house isn't quite a dead issue..."

Paul laughed and snapped the paper ball into the air. "Not quite. But the way I feel at the moment: love me, love my house. And, speaking of houses—Down, sir! Down, I say!"

The house had crept down the slope behind him as he spoke, extruded a bay window and nuzzled his back with it. Now, at his sharp reproach, the window was sucked abruptly into the wall. The house sidled backward to its place at the top of the hill and stood quivering slightly. The trumpet solo developed extremely mournful overtones.

"Does... does it do that often?"

"Every time I move a little distance away," he assured her. "I could stop it permanently with a direct overall command, but I find it sort of flattering. I also don't want to step on a pretty warm personality. No harm in it. Hey, Connor, what do you think?"

The doctor perspired his plump body past them and considered the noisy structure warily. "Just now—I confess I don't know."

"Better give it up, Connor," Esther advised, "or you'll rupture an analysis."

Paul slapped his back. "Come inside and I'll explain it over a couple of glasses of beer I just got thirsty enough to think about."

Five beers later, Dr. Connor Kuntz used the black beads he had in place of eyes to watch his host shimmer from the uniform of the Coldstream Guards to a sharply cut tuxedo.

"Of course I believe it. Since it is so, it is so. You have a living house here. Now we must decide what we are to do with it."

Paul Marquis looked up, halfway into a white gabardine suit. The lapels, still tuxedo, hesitated; then gathered their energies and blended into a loose summer outfit.

"What
we
are to do with it?"

Kuntz rose and wrapped his hands behind his back, slapping the knuckles of one into the palm of the other. "You're quite right about keeping the information secret from the men in the development; a careless word and you would be undergoing swarms of dangerously inquisitive tourists. I must get in touch with Dr. Dufayel in Quebec; this is very much his province. Although there's a young man at Johns Hopkins—How much have you learned of its basic, let us say its
personal
composition?"

The young physicist's face lost its grip on resentment. "Well, the wood feels like wood, the metal like metal, the plastic like plastic. And when the house produces a glass-like object, it's real glass so far as I can determine without a chemical analysis. Es, here, took—"

"That's one of the reasons I decided to bring Connor along. Biologically and chemically, the water is safe—too safe. It's absolutely pure H
₂
O. What do you think of my chlorophyll roof theory, doctor?"

He ducked his head at her. "Possibly. Some form of solar energy transformation in any case. But chlorophyll would argue a botanical nature, while it has distinct and varied means of locomotion—internal and external. Furthermore, the manipulation of metals which do not exist in any quantities in this region suggest subatomic reorganization of materials. Esther, we must prepare some slides from this creature. Suppose you run out to the plane like a good girl and get my kit. For that matter, you can prepare slides yourself, can't you? I want to explore a bit."

"Slides?" Paul Marquis asked uncertainly as the bacteriologist started for the open door. "It's a living thing, you know."

"Ah, we'll just take a small area from an... a nonvital spot. Much like scraping a bit of skin off the human hand. Tell me," the doctor requested, thumping on the table experimentally, "you no doubt have some vague theories as to origin?"

Marquis settled himself back in a gleaming chair. "As a matter of fact, they're a little more than that. I remembered the ore in Pit Fourteen gave out suddenly after showing a lot of promise. Pit Fourteen's the closest to here from Little Fermi. Adler, the geologist in charge, commented at the time that it seemed as if Pit Fourteen had been worked before—about six thousand years ago. Either that or glacial scraping. But since there was little evidence of glacial scraping in the neighborhood, and
no
evidence of a previous, prehistoric pitchblende mine, he dropped the matter. I think this house is the rest of the proof of that prehistoric mine. I also think we'll find radioactive ore all the way from this site to the edge of Pit Fourteen."

"Comfortable situation for you if they do," Kuntz observed, moving into the kitchen. Paul Marquis rose and followed him. "How would this peculiar domicile enter into the situation?"

"Well, unless our archaeology still has to grow out of its diapers, nobody on Earth was interested in pitchblende six thousand years ago. That would leave the whole wide field of extraterrestrials—from a planet of our sun or one of the other stars. This could have been a fueling station for their ships, a regularly worked mine, or an unforeseen landing to make repairs and take on fuel."

"And the house?"

"The house was their dwelling—probably a makeshift, temporary job—while they worked the mine. When they went, they left it here as humans will leave deserted wood and metal shacks when they move out of Little Fermi one day. It lay here waiting for something—say the thought of ownership or the desire for a servitor-dwelling—to release a telepathic trigger that would enable it to assume its function of—"

A despairing shout from Esther tugged them outside.

"I've just broken my second scalpel on this chunk of iridium masquerading as fragile flesh. I have a definite suspicion, Paul, that I won't so much as scratch it unless you give me permission. Please tell your house it's all right for me to take a tiny chunk."

"It's... it's all right," Paul said uncomfortably, then added, "only, try not to hurt it too much."

Leaving the girl slicing a long, thin strip from the western corner, they walked down the cellar steps into the basement. Connor Kuntz stumbled around peering down at the floor for some example of an obviously biological organ. He found only whitewashed cement.

"Assume its function of—" he said at last. "Its function of serving! My dear fellow, do you realize this house has a sex?"

"Sex?" Paul moved aback, taken there by the thought. "You mean it can have lots of little bungalows?"

"Oh, not in the reproductive sense, not in the reproductive sense!" The plump doctor would have prodded him in the ribs if he hadn't started hurriedly up the stairs. "It has sex in the emotional, the psychological sense. As a woman wants to be a wife to a man, as a man searches for a woman to whom he can be an adequate husband—just so this house desires to be a
home
to a living creature who both needs it and owns it. As such it fulfills itself and becomes capable of its one voluntary act—the demonstration of affection, again in terms of the creature it serves. By the by, it also seems to be that theoretically happy medium in those disagreements on twentieth-century domestic arrangements with which you and Esther liven up the mess hall on occasion. Unostentatious love and imaginative service."

"Does at that. If only Es didn't make a habit of plucking my nerve-ends... Hum. Have you noticed how pleasant she's been today?"

"Of course. The house has made adjustments in her personality for your greater happiness."

"
What?
Es has been changed? You're crazy, Connor!"

"On the contrary, my boy. I assure you she was just as argumentative back in Little Fermi and on the way out here as she ever was. The moment she saw you, she became most traditionally feminine—without losing one jot of her acuity or subtlety, remember that. When someone like Esther Sakarian who has avoided the 'You are so right, my lord' attitude all her life acquires it overnight, she has had help. In this case, the house."

Paul Marquis dug his knuckles at the solid, reassuring substance of the basement wall. "Es has been changed by the house for my possible personal convenience? I don't know if I like that. Es should be Es, good or bad. Besides, it might take a notion to change me."

The older man looked at him with a deadly twinkle. "I don't know how it affects personalities—high-order therapeutic radiation on an intellectual level?—but let me ask you this, Paul, wouldn't you like to be happy at the agreeable alteration in Miss Sakarian? And, furthermore, wouldn't you like to think that the house couldn't affect your own attitudes?"

"Of course." Paul shrugged his shoulders. "For that matter, I
am
happy about Es getting some womanly sense in her head. And, come to think of it, I doubt if you or anyone else could ever convince me that the house could push mental fixations around like so much furniture. Whole thing's too ridiculous for further discussion."

Connor Kuntz chortled and slapped his thighs for emphasis. "Perfect! And now you can't even imagine that the wish for such a state of mind made the house produce it in you. It learns to serve you better all the time! Dr. Dufayel is going to appreciate this!"

"A point there. I don't go for advertising my peculiar residence and its properties—whatever they are—up and down the field of research medicine. Is there any way I can persuade you to lay off?"

Kuntz stopped his dignified little dance and looked up seriously. "Why, certainly! I can think of at least two good reasons why I should never again discuss your house with anyone but you or Esther." He seemed to consider a moment. "Rather, I should say there are six or seven reasons for not mentioning your house's existence to Dufayel or any other biologist. In fact, there are literally dozens and dozens of reasons."

—|—

Paul followed Connor Kuntz and Esther back to the copter, promising them he'd be in for duty the next morning. "But I'm going to spend my nights here from now on."