"It took me awhile to realize it. The mind constructs reality. Frames it. Creates it. We all have a common reality, a common dream. But Haskel turned his back on our common reality and created his own. And he had a unique capacity – far beyond the ordinary. He devoted his whole life, his whole skill to building it. He's there now."
Tyler hesitated and frowned. He gripped the wheel tightly and increased speed. The Buick hissed along the dark street, through the silent, unmoving bleakness that was the town.
"There's only one thing," he continued presently. "One thing I don't understand."
"What is it?"
"The model. It was also gone. I assumed he'd – shrink, I suppose. Merge with it. But the model's gone, too." Tyler shrugged. "It doesn't matter." He peered into the darkness. "We're almost there. This is Elm."
It was then Madge screamed.
"Look!"
To the right of the car was a small, neat building. And a sign. The sign was easily visible in the darkness.
WOODLAND MORTUARY
Madge was sobbing in horror. The car roared forward, automatically guided by Tyler's numb hands. Another sign flashed by briefly, as they coasted up before the city hall.
STEUBEN PET SHOP
The city hall was lit by recessed, hidden illumination. A low, simple building, a square of glowing white. Like a marble Greek temple.
Tyler pulled the car to a halt. Then suddenly shrieked and started up again. But not soon enough.
The two shiny-black police cars came silently up around the Buick, one on each side. The four stern cops already had their hands on the door. Stepping out and coming toward him, grim and efficient.
"Here we go, sir," the robot pilot said. The words startled Rogers and made him look up sharply. He tensed his body and adjusted the trace web inside his coat as the bubble ship started dropping, swiftly and silently, toward the planet's surface.
This – his heart caught – was Williamson's World. The legendary lost planet – found, after three centuries. By accident, of course. This blue and green planet, the holy grail of the Galactic System, had been almost miraculously discovered by a routine charting mission.
Frank Williamson had been the first Terran to develop an outer-space drive – the first to hop from the Solar System toward the universe beyond. He had never come back. He – his world, his colony – had never been found. There had been endless rumors, false leads, fake legends – and nothing more.
"I'm receiving field clearance." The robot pilot raised the gain on the control speaker, and clicked to attention.
"Field ready," came a ghostly voice from below. "Remember, your drive mechanism is unfamiliar to us. How much run is required? Emergency brake-walls are up."
Rogers smiled. He could hear the pilot telling them that no run would be required. Not with this ship. The brake-walls could be lowered with perfect safety.
Three hundred years! It had taken a long time to find Williamson's World. Many authorities had given him up. Some believed he had never landed, had died out in space. Perhaps there was
no
Williamson's World. Certainly there had been no real clues, nothing tangible to go on. Frank Williamson and three families had utterly disappeared in the trackless void, never to be heard from again.
Until now…
The young man met him at the field. He was thin and red-haired and dressed in a colorful suit of bright material. "You're from the Galactic Relay Center?" he asked.
"That's right," Rogers said huskily. "I'm Edward Rogers."
The young man held out his hand. Rogers shook it awkwardly. "My name is Williamson," the young man said. "Gene Williamson."
The name thundered in Rogers' ears. "Are you -"
The young man nodded, his gaze enigmatical. "I'm his great-great-great-great-grandson. His tomb is here. You may see it, if you wish."
"I almost expected to see him. He's – well, almost a god-figure to us. The first man to break out of the Solar System."
"He means a lot to us, too," the young man said. "He brought us here. They searched a long time before they found a planet that was habitable." Williamson waved at the city stretched out beyond the field. "This one proved satisfactory. It's the System's tenth planet."
Rogers' eyes began to shine. Williamson's World. Under his feet. He stamped hard as they walked down the ramp together, away from the field. How many men in the Galaxy had dreamed of striding down a landing ramp onto Williamson's World with a young descendant of Frank Williamson beside them?
"They'll all want to come here," Williamson said, as if aware of his thoughts. "Throw rubbish around and break off the flowers. Pick up handfuls of dirt to take back." He laughed a little nervously. "The Relay will control them, of course."
"Of course," Rogers assured him.
At the ramp-end Rogers stopped short. For the first time he saw the city.
"What's wrong?" Gene Williamson asked, with a faint trace of amusement.
They had been cut off, of course. Isolated – so perhaps it wasn't so surprising. It was a wonder they weren't living in caves, eating raw meat. But Williamson had always symbolized progress – development. He had been a man
ahead
of other men.
True, his space-drive by modern standards had been primitive, a curiosity. But the concept remained unaltered; Williamson the pioneer, and inventor. The man who built.
Yet the city was nothing more than a village, with a few dozen houses, and some public buildings and industrial units at its perimeter. Beyond the city stretched green fields, hills, and broad prairies. Surface vehicles crawled leisurely along the narrow streets and most of the citizens walked on foot. An incredible anachronism it seemed, dragged up from the past.
"I'm accustomed to the uniform Galactic culture," Rogers said. "Relay keeps the technocratic and ideological level constant throughout. It's hard to adjust to such a radically different social stage. But you've been cut off."
"Cut off?" asked Williamson.
"From Relay. You've had to develop without help."
In front of them a surface vehicle crept to a halt. The driver opened the doors manually.
"Now that I recall these factors, I can adjust," Rogers assured him.
"On the contrary," Williamson said, entering the vehicle. "We've been receiving your Relay coordinates for over a century." He motioned Rogers to get in beside him.
Rogers was puzzled. "I don't understand. You mean you hooked onto the web and yet made no attempt to -"
"We receive your coordinates," Gene Williamson said, "but our citizens are not interested in using them."
The surface vehicle hurried along the highway, past the rim of an immense red hill. Soon the city lay behind them – a faintly glowing place reflecting the rays of the sun. Bushes and plants appeared along the highway. The sheer side of the cliff rose, a towering wall of deep red sandstone; ragged, untouched.
"Nice evening," Williamson said.
Rogers nodded in disturbed agreement.
Williamson rolled down the window. Cool air blew into the car. A few gnatlike insects followed. Far off, two tiny figures were plowing a field – a man and a huge lumbering beast.
"When will we be there?" Rogers asked.
"Soon. Most of us live away from the cities. We live in the country – in isolated self-sufficient farm units. They're modeled on the manors of the Middle Ages."
"Then you maintain only the most rudimentary subsistence level. How many people live on each farm?"
"Perhaps a hundred men and women."
"A hundred people can't manage anything more complex than weaving and dyeing and paper pressing."
"We have special industrial units – manufacturing systems. This vehicle is a good example of what we can turn out. We have communication and sewage and medical agencies. We have technological advantages equal to Terra's."
"Terra of the twenty-first century," Rogers protested. "But that was three hundred years ago. You're purposely maintaining an archaic culture in the face of the Relay coordinates. It doesn't make any sense."
"Maybe we prefer it."
"But you're not free to prefer an inferior cultural stage. Every culture has to keep pace with the general trend. Relay makes actual a uniformity of development. It integrates the valid factors and rejects the rest."
They were approaching the farm, Gene Williamson's "manor." It consisted of a few simple buildings clustered together in a valley, to the side of the highway, surrounded by fields and pastures. The surface vehicle turned down a narrow side road and spiraled cautiously toward the floor of the valley. The air became darker. Cold wind blew into the car, and the driver clicked his headlights on.
"No robots?" Rogers asked.
"No," Williamson replied. "We do all our own work."
"You're making a purely arbitrary distinction," Rogers pointed out. "A robot is a machine. You don't dispense with machines as such. This car is a machine."
"True," Williamson acknowledged.
"The machine is a development of the tool," Rogers went on. "The ax is a simple machine. A stick becomes a tool, a simple machine, in the hands of a man reaching for something. A machine is merely a multi-element tool that increases the power ratio. Man is the tool-making animal. The history of man is the history of tools into machines, greater and more efficient functioning elements. If you reject machinery you reject man's essential key."
"Here we are," Williamson said. The vehicle came to a halt and the driver opened the doors for them.
Three or four wooden buildings loomed up in the darkness. A few dim shapes moved around – human shapes.
"Dinner's ready," Williamson said, sniffing. "I can smell it."
They entered the main building. Several men and women were sitting at a long rough table. Plates and dishes had been set in front of them. They were waiting for Williamson.
"This is Edward Rogers," Williamson announced. The people studied Rogers curiously, then turned back to their food.
"Sit down," a dark-eyed girl urged. "By me."
They made a place for him near the end of the table. Rogers started forward, but Williamson restrained him. "Not there. You're
my
guest. You're expected to sit with me."
The girl and her companion laughed. Rogers sat down awkwardly by Williamson. The bench was rough and hard under him. He examined a handmade wooden drinking cup. The food was piled in huge wooden bowls. There was a stew and a salad and great loaves of bread.
"We could be back in the fourteenth century," Rogers said.
"Yes," Williamson agreed. "Manor life goes back to Roman times and to the classical world. The Gauls. Britons."
"These people here. Are they -"
Williamson nodded. "My family. We're divided up into small units arranged according to the traditional patriarch basis. I'm the oldest male and titular head."
The people were eating rapidly, intent on their food – boiled meat, vegetables, scooped up with hunks of bread and butter and washed down with milk. The room was lit by fluorescent lighting.
"Incredible," Rogers murmured. "You're still using electric power."
"Oh, yes. There are plenty of waterfalls on this planet. The vehicle was electric. It was run by a storage battery."
"Why are there no older men?" Rogers saw several dried-up old women, but Williamson was the oldest man. And he couldn't have been over thirty.
"The fighting," Williamson replied, with an expressive gesture.
"Fighting?"
"Clan wars between families are a major part of our culture." Williamson nodded toward the long table. "We don't live long."
Rogers was stunned. "Clan wars? But -"
"We have pennants, and emblems – like the old Scottish tribes."
He touched a bright ribbon on his sleeve, the representation of a bird. "There are emblems and colors for each family and we fight over them. The Williamson family no longer controls this planet. There is no central agency, now. For a major issue we have the plebiscite – a vote by all the clans. Each family on the planet has a vote."
"Like the American Indians."
Williamson nodded. "It's a tribal system. In time we'll be distinct tribes, I suppose. We still retain a common language, but we're breaking up – decentralizing. And each family to its own ways, its own customs and manners."
"Just what do you fight for?"
Williamson shrugged. "Some real things like land and women. Some imaginary. Prestige for instance. When honor is at stake we have an official semi-annual public battle. A man from each family takes part. The best warrior and his weapons."
"Like the medieval joust."
"We've drawn from all traditions. Human tradition as a whole."
"Does each family have its separate deity?"
Williamson laughed. "No. We worship in common a vague animism. A sense of the general positive vitality of the universal process." He held up a loaf of bread. "Thanks for all this."
"Which you grew yourselves."
"On a planet provided for us." Williamson ate his bread thoughtfully. "The old records say the ship was almost finished. Fuel just about gone – one dead, and waste after another. If this planet hadn't turned up, the whole expedition would have perished."
"Cigar?" Williamson said, when the empty bowls had been pushed back.
"Thanks." Rogers accepted a cigar noncommittally. Williamson lit his own, and settled back against the wall.
"How long are you staying?" he asked presently.
"Not long," Rogers answered.
"There's a bed fixed up for you," Williamson said. "We retire early, but there'll be some kind of dancing, also singing and dramatic acts. We devote a lot of time to staging, and producing drama."
"You place an emphasis on psychological release?"
"We enjoy making and doing things, if that's what you mean."
Rogers stared about him. The walls were covered with murals painted directly on the rough wood. "So I see," he said. "You grind your own colors from clay and berries?"
"Not quite," Williamson replied. "We have a big pigment industry. Tomorrow I'll show you our kiln where we fire our own things. Some of our best work is with fabrics and screen processes."
"Interesting. A decentralized society, moving gradually back into primitive tribalism. A society that voluntarily rejects the advanced technocratic and cultural products of the Galaxy, and thus deliberately withdraws from contact with the rest of mankind."
"From the uniform Relay-controlled society only," Williamson insisted.
"Do you know why Relay maintains a uniform level for all worlds?" Rogers asked. "I'll tell you. There are two reasons. First, the body of knowledge which men have amassed doesn't permit duplication of experiment. There's no time.
"When a discovery has been made it's absurd to repeat it on countless planets throughout the universe. Information gained on any of the thousand worlds is flashed to Relay Center and then out again to the whole Galaxy. Relay studies and selects experiences and coordinates them into a rational, functional system with contradictions. Relay orders the total experience of mankind into a coherent structure."
"And the second reason?"
"If uniform culture is maintained, controlled from a central source, there won't be war."
"True," Williamson admitted.
"We've abolished war. It's as simple as that. We have a homogeneous culture like that of ancient Rome – a common culture for all mankind which we maintain throughout the Galaxy. Each planet is as involved in it as any other. There are no backwaters of culture to breed envy and hatred."
"Such as this."
Rogers let out his breath slowly. "Yes – you've confronted us with a strange situation. We've searched for Williamson's World for three centuries. We've wanted it, dreamed of finding it. It has seemed like Prester John's Empire – a fabulous world, cut off from the rest of humanity. Maybe not real at all. Frank Williamson might have crashed."