Parallel Worlds of Clifford D. Simak
*3.8.1904
+25.4.1988
Further Excerpts from
Simak's Travels into Parallel Worlds
"'Harder,'
Jenkins thought. 'Harder! Harder!'
A quiver went across his mind and he brushed it
away. Not hypnotism - not yet telepathy, but the best that he could do. A
drawing together, a huddling together of minds - and it was all a game.
Slowly, carefully, he brought out the hidden
symbol - the words, the thought and the inflection. Easily he slid them into
his brain, one by one, like one would speak to a child, trying to teach it the
exact tone, the way to hold its lips, the way to move its tongue.
He let them lay there for a moment, felt the
other minds touching them, felt the fingers dabbing at them. And then he
thought them aloud - thought them as the cobbly had thought them.
And nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. No
click within his brain. No feeling of falling. No vertigo. No sensation at all.
So he had failed. So it was over. So the game
was done.
He opened his eyes and the hillside was the
same. The sun still shone and the sky was robin's egg.
He sat stiffly, silently and felt them looking
at him.
Everything was the same as it had been before.
Except -
There was a daisy where the clump of Oswego tea
had bloomed redly before. There was a pasture rose beside him and there had
been none when he had closed his eyes..."
(Clifford D. Simak: City)
"One world and then another, running like a
chain. One world treading on the heels of another world that plodded just
ahead. One world's tomorrow, another world's today. And yesterday is tomorrow,
and tomorrow is the past.
Except, there wasn't any past. No past, that
was, except the figment of remembrance that flitted like a night-winged thing
in the shadow of one's mind. No past that one could reach. No pictures painted
on the wall of time. No film that one could run backwards and see
what-once-had-been...
One road was open, but another road was closed.
Not closed, of course, for it had never been. For there wasn't any past, there
never had been any, there wasn't room for one. Where there should have been a
past there was another world.
Like two dogs walking in one another's tracks.
One dog steps out and another dog steps in. Like a long, endless row of ball
bearings running down a groove, almost touching, but not quite. Like the links
of an endless chain running on a wheel with a billion billion sprockets..."
(Clifford D. Simak: City)
""There isn't any room," said Joshua.
"You travel back along the line of time and you don't find the past, but
another world., another bracket of consciousness. The earth would be the same,
you see, or almost the same. Same trees, same rivers, same hills, but it
wouldn't be the world we know. Because it has lived a different life, it has
developed differently. The second back of us is not the second back of us at
all, but another second, a totally separate sector of time. We live in the same
second all the time. We move along within the bracket of that second, that tiny
bit of time that has been allotted to our particular world."
"The way we keep time was to blame,"
said Ichabod. "It was the thing that kept us from thinking of it in the
way it really was. For we thought all the time that we were passing through
time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along
with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and
another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the
minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had
just moved along and we had moved with it."
Jenkins nodded. "I see. Like driftwood on
the river. Chips moving with the river. And the scene changes along the river
bank, but the water is the same."
"That's roughly it," said Joshua.
"Except that time is a rigid stream and the different worlds are more
firmly fixed in place than the driftwood on the river."
"And the cobblies live in those other
worlds?"
Joshua nodded. "I'm sure they must.""
(Clifford D. Simak: City)
"The
grey shadow slid along the rocky ledge, heading for the den, mewing to itself
in frustration and bitter disappointment - for the Words had failed.
The slanting sun of early afternoon picked out a
face and head and body, indistinct and murky, like a haze of morning mist
rising from the gully.
Suddenly the ledge pinched off and the shadow
stopped, bewildered, crouched against the rocky wall - for there was no den.
The ledge pinched off before it reached the den!
It whirled around like a snapping whip, stared
back across the valley. And the river was all wrong. It flowed closer to the
bluffs than it had flowed before. There was a swallow's nest on the rocky wall
and there'd never been a swallow's nest before.
The shadow stiffened and the tufted tentacles on
its ears came up and searched the air.
There was life! The scent of it lay faint upon
the air, the feel of it vibrated across the empty notches of the marching
hills.
The shadow stirred, came out of its crouch,
flowed along the ledge.
There was no den and the river was different and
there was a swalow's nest plastered on the cliff.
The shadow quivered, drooling mentally.
The Words had been right. They had not failed.
This was a different world."
(Clifford D. Simak: City)
...He
could go back into the basement, but that wasn't any better than the place he
was. He could saunter out into the store and act like a customer, finally walk
out into the street, doing his best to look like an ordinary citizen who had
dropped into the place to look at some treasured gun or tool he wished that he
could buy. But he doubted that he could carry it off.
So the ilIogic hadn't paid off, after all. Logic
and reason were still the winners, still the factors that ruled the ordering of
men's lives.
There was no escape from this sun-lit nest
behind the crated stove.
There was no escape, unless -
He had found the top again. He had the top there
with him. There was no escape - unless the top should work, there was no
escape.
He put the top's point on the ftoor and spun it
slowly, pumping on the handle. It picked up speed; he pumped it faster. He let
go and it spun, whistling. He hunkered in front of it and watched the
coloured.stripes. He saw them come into being and he followed them into
infinity and he wondered where they went. He forced his attention on the top,
narrowing it down until the top was all he saw.
It didn't work. The top wobbled and he put out a
hand and stopped it.
He tried again.
He had to be an eight-year-old. He had to go
back to childhood once again. He must clear away his mind, sweep out all adult
thoughts, all the adult worry, all sophistication. He must become a child.
He thought of playing in the sand, of napping
under trees, of the feel of soft dust beneath bare feet. He closed his eyes and
concentrated and caught the vision of a childhood and the colour and the smell
of it.
He opened his eyes and watched the stripes and
filled his mind with wonder, with the question of their being and the question
of where they went when they disappeared.
It didn't work. The top wobbled and he stopped
it.
A frantic thought wedged its way into his
consciousness. He didn't have much time. He had to hurry.
He pushed the thought away.
A child had no conception of time. For the
child, time went on forever and forever. He was a little boy and he had all the
tirne there was and he owned a brand new top.
He spun the top again.
He knew the comfort of a home and a loved mother
and the playthings scattered on the ftoor and the story books that Grandma
would read to him when she came visiting again. And he watched the top, with a
simple, childish wonder - watching the stripes come up and disappear, come up
and disappear, come up and disappear -
He fell a foot or so and thumped upon the ground
and he was sitting atop a hilI and the land stretched out before him for miles
and miles and miles, an empty land of waving grass and groves of trees and
far-off, winding water.
He looked down at his feet and the top was
there, slowly spinning to a wobbling halt.
30
The land lay
new and empty of any mark of Man, a land of raw earth and sky; even the
wildness of the wind that swept across it seemed to say that the land was
untamed.
From his hilltop, Vickers saw bands of dark,
moving shapes that he felt sure were small herds of buffalo and even as he
watched three wolves came loping up the slope, saw him and veered off, angling
down the hill. In the blue sweep of sky that arched from horizon to horizon
with a single cloud a bird wheeled gracefully, spying out the land. It screeched
and the screech came down to Vickers as a high, thin sound filtered through the
sky.
The top had brought him through. He was safe in
this empty land with wolves and buffalo.
He climbed to the ridgetop and looked across the
reaches of the grassland, with its frequent groves and many watercourses,
sparkling in the sun. There was no sign of human habitation - no roads, no
threads of smoke sifting up the sky.
(Clifford D. Simak: "Ring
Around the Sun", from the end of Chapter 29 and beginning of Chapter 30)
It was no
alien land - no alien dimension into which the top had flung bim, although, of
course, it had not been the top at all. The top hadn't had anything to do with
it. The top was simply something on which one focused one's attention, simply a
hypnotic device to aid the mind in the job which it must do. The top had helped
him come into true land, but it had been his mind and that strange otherness
that was his which had enabled him to travel from old familiar Earth to this
strange, primal place.
There was something he had heard or read....
He was searching for it, digging back into his
brain with frantic mental fingers.
A news story, perhaps. Or something he had
heard. Or something he had seen on television.
It came to bim finally - the story about the man
in Boston - a Dr Aldridge, he seemed to remember, who had said that there might
be more worlds than one, that there might be a world a second ahead of ours and
one a second behind ours and another a second behind that and still another and
another and another, a long string of worlds whirling one behind the other,
like men walking in the snow, one man putting his foot in the same track and so
on down the line.
An endless chain of worlds, one behind the
other. A ring around the sun.
He hadn't finished reading the story, he
remembered; something had distracted him and he'd laid the paper down. Smoking
the cigarette down to its final shred, he wished that he had read it all. For
Aldridge might have been right. This might be the next world after the old,
familiar Earth, the next link on an endless chain of earths.
He tried to puzzle out the logic of such a ring
of worlds but he gave up, for he had no idea of why it should be so.
Say, then, that this was Earth. No. Two, the
next earth behind the original Earth which he had left behind. Say, then, that
in topographical features the earths would resemble one another, not exactly
like one another perhaps, but very close in their topography, with little
differences here and there, each magnified in turn until probably a matter of
ten earths back the change would become noticeable. But this was only the
second earth and perhaps its features were but little changed, and on old Earth
he had been somehow in Illinois and this, he told himself, was the kind of land
the ancient Illinois would have been.
As a boy of eight he had gone into a land where
there had been a garden and a house in a grove of trees and maybe this was the
very earth he had visited then. lf that were so, the house might still be
there. And in later years he had walked an enchanted valley and it, too, might
have been this earth, and if that were true, then there was another Preston
house on this very earth exactly like the one which stood so proudly in the
Earth of his childhood.
There was a chance, he told himself. A slim
chance, but the only chance he had....
(Clifford D. Simak: "Ring
Around the Sun", from the end of Chapter 30)
lt was a
good life bere, 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.
lt was a good life, Vickers silently agreed.
Here again was the old American frontier, idealised 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 pattem that the mutants planned. lt 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 neighbourhood 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
programme 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 irnpossible 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, airn 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 tirne you could
arrive at a fotrnula 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 son 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 channelled by good leadership,
would come paradise on earth - or on many earths.
(Clifford D. Simak: "Ring
Around the Sun", from the Chapter 36)
"Millville had gone away somewhere, into some
other world. Although that was wrong, I told myself. For somewhere, in its same
old world, there yet must be a Millville. It had not been Millville, but
myself, that had gone away. I had taken just one step and had walked clear out
of Milville into another place.
Yet, while it was a different place, the terrain
seemed to be identical with the old terrain. I still was standing in the dip of
ground that lay behind my house and back of me the hill rose steeply to the
non-existent street where Doc's house had stood and a half mile away loomed the
hill where the Sherwood house should be."
(Clifford D. Simak: All Flesh is Grass)
"What
strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must
occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step from one world to another.
I stood, a stranger in an unknown land, with the
perfume of the flowers clogging not my nostrils only, but every pore of me,
pressing in upon me, as if the flowers themselves were rolling in great purple
waves to bear me down and bury me for all eternity. The world was quiet; it was
the quietest place I had ever been. There was no sound at all. And I realized
that perhaps at no time in my life had I ever known silence. Always there had
been something that had made some sort of noise - the chirring of a lone insect
in the quiet of a summer noon, or the rustle of a leaf. Even in the dead of the
night there would have been the creaking of the timbers in the house, the
murmur of the furnace, the slight keening of a wind that ran along the eaves.
But there was silence here. There was no sound
at all. There was no sound, I knew, because there was nothing that could make a
sound. There were no trees or bushes; there were no birds or insects. There was
nothing here but the flowers and the soil in which they grew.
A silence and the emptiness that held the
silence in its hand, and the purpleness that ran to the far horizon to meet the
burnished, pale-blue brightness of a summer sky."
(Clifford D. Simak: All Flesh is
Grass)
""What
is this place?" I asked.
"This is an alternate Earth," said the
Flowers. "It's no more than a clock-tick away from yours."
"An alternate Earth?"
"Yes. There are many Earths. You did not
know that , did you?"
"No," I said, "I didn't."
"But you can believe it?"
"With a little practice, maybe."
"There are billions of Earths," the
Flowers told me. "We don't know how many, but there are many billions of
them. There may be no end to them. There are some who think so."
"One behind the other?"
"No. That's not the way to think of it. We
don't know how to tell it. It becomes confused in telling."
"So let's say there are a lot of Earths.
It's a little hard to understand. If there were a lot of Earths, we'd see
them."
"You could not see them," said the
Flowers, "unless you could see in time. The alternate Earths exist in a
time matrix..."
"A time matrix? You mean..."
"The simplest way to say it is that time
divides the many Earths. Each one is distinguished by its time-location. All
that exists for you in the present moment. You cannot see into the past or
future..."
"Then to get here I travelled into
time."
"Yes," said the Flowers. "That is
exactly what you did."
...
"I choke on it," I told them.
"Let's try to say it another way. Earth is
a basic structure, but it progresses along the time path by a process of
discontinuity.""
(Clifford D. Simak: All Flesh is
Grass)
""The barrier," said the Flowers,
"is a rather simple thing. It is a time bubble we managed to project
outward from the thin spot in the boundary that separates our worlds. That one
slight area of space it occupies is out of phase both with Millville and with
the rest of your Earth. The smallest imaginable fraction of a second in the
past, running that fraction of a second of time behind the time of Earth. So
slight a fraction of a second, perhaps, that it would be difficult, we should
imagine, for the most sophisticated of your instruments to take a measurement.
A very little thing and yet, we imagine you'll agree, it is quite
effective.""
(Clifford D. Simak: All Flesh is Grass)
"(Jones
said:) "... Once there was, as you say, only one world. I do not know
how long ago - there is no way of knowing. Then one day something happened. I
don't know what it was, we may never know exactly what it was or how it came
about. But on that day one man did a certain thing - it would have to have been
one man, for this thing he did was so unique that there was no chance of more
than one man doing it. But, anyhow, he did it, or he spoke it, or he thought
it, whatever it might be, and from that day forward there were two worlds, not
one - or at least the possibility of two worlds, not one. The distinction, to
start with, would have been shadowy, the two worlds perhaps not too far apart,
shading into one another so that you might have thought they were still one
world, but becoming solider and drawing further apart until there could be no
doubt that there were two worlds. To start with, they would not have been
greatly different, but as time went on, the differences hardened and the worlds
diverged. They had to diverge because they were irreconcilable. They, or the
people in them, were following different paths. One world to begin with, then
splitting into two worlds..." "
(Clifford D. Simak: "Enchanted
Pilgrimage",
Methuen 1985; p. 107-108)
"Now,
please," said Hoot, "all of us together leave us bring forth the
door."
His tentacles shot out in front of him, so fast they
seemed to snap, standing out rigidly with their tips a-quiver.
God knows, I tried to concentrate. I tried to see a
door in front of us, and, so help me, I did see it, a sort of ghostly door with
a thin edge of light around it, and once I saw it, I fried to pull on it, but
there was nothing on it for a man to grab a hold of and with nothing to grab a
hold on there was little chance of pulling. But I tried just the same and kept
on trying. I could almost feel the fingers of my mind trying to get hold of its
smooth and slippery surfaces, then slowly sliding off.
We would never make it, I knew. The door seemed to be
coming open a bit, for the crack of light around it appeared to have widened.
But it would take too long; we never could hold out, to get it open wide enough
so we could slide through.
I was getting terribly tired - both mentally and
physically, it seemed - and I knew the others could be in no better shape. We
would try again, of course, and again and again, but we'd be getting weaker all
the time and if we couldn't get it open in the first several tries, I knew that
we were sunk. So I tried the harder and I seemed to get some small hold on it
and pulled with all my might and could feel the others pulling, too - and the
door began to open, swinging back toward us on invisible hinges until there was
room enough for a man to get his hand into the crack, that is, if the door had
been really there. But I knew, even as I pulled and sweated mentally, that the
door had no physical existence and that it was something a man could never lay
a hand on.
Then, with the door beginning to open, we failed. All
of us together. And there was no door. There was nothing but the dune climbing
up the sky.
Something crunched behind us and I jumped up and
swung around. The wheel loomed tall above us, crunching to a halt, and swarming
down from the green mass in the center, swinging down the silvery spider web
between the rim and hub was a blob that dripped. It was not a spider, although
the basic shape of it and the way it came scrambling down the web brought a
spider to one's mind. A spider would have been friendly and cozy alongside this
monstrosity that came crawling down the web. It was a quivering obscenity,
dripping with some sort of filthy slime, and it had a dozen legs or arms, and
at one end of the dripping blob was what might have been a face - and there is
no way to put into words the kind of horror that it carried with it, the
loathsome feeling of uncleanliness just from seeing it, as if the very sight of
it were enough to contaminate one's flesh and mind, the screaming need to keep
one's distance from it, the fear that it might come close enough to touch one.
As it came down the web it was making a noise and
steadily, it seemed, the noise became louder. Although it had what one could
imagine was its face, it had no mouth with which to make the noise, but even with
no mouth, the noise came out of it and washed over us. In the noise was the
crunch of great teeth splintering bones, mixed with the slobbering of scavenger
gulping at a hasty, putrid feast, and an angry chittering that had unreason in
it. It wasn't any of these things alone; it was all of them together, or the
sense of all of them together, and perhaps if a man had been forced to go on
listening to it for long enough he might have detected in it other sounds as
well.
It reached the rim of the wheel and leaped off the
web to land upon the dune - spraddled there, looming over us, with the
filthiness of it dripping off its body and splashing on the sand. I could see
the tiny balls of wet sand where the nastiness had dropped.
It stood there, raging at us, the noise of it filling
all that world of sand and bouncing off the sky.
And in the noise there seemed to be a word, as if the
word were hidden and embedded in the strata of the sound. Bowed down beneath
that barrage of sound, it seemed that finally I could feel - not hear, but feel
- the word.
"Begone!" it seemed to shout at us.
"Begone! Begone! Begone!"
From somewhere out of that moonlit-starlit night,
from that land of heaving dunes, came a wind, or some force like a wind, that
hammered at us and drove us back - although, come to think of it, it could not
have been a wind, for no cloud of sand came with it and there was no roaring
such as a wind would make. But it hit us like a fist and staggered us and sent
us reeling back.
As I staggered back with the loathesome creature
still spraddled on the dune and still raging at us, I realized that there was
no longer sand underneath my feet, but some sort of paving.
Then, quite suddenly, the dune was no longer there,
but a wall, as if a door we could not see had been slammed before our faces,
and when this happened the creature's storm of rage came to an end and in its
stead was silence.
But not for long, that silence, for Smith began an
insane crying. "He is back again! My friend is back again! He's is in my
mind again! He has come back to me."
"Shut up!" I yelled at him. "Shut up
that yammering!"
He quieted down a bit, but he went on muttering, flat
upon his bottom, with his legs stuck out in front of him and that silly,
sickening look of ecstasy painted on his face.
I took a quick look around and saw that we were back
where we had come from, in that room with all the panels and behind each panel
the shimmering features of another world.
Safely back, I thought with some thankfulness, but
through no effort of our own. Finally, given time enough, we might have hauled
that door wide enough for us to have gotten through. But we hadn't had to do
it; it had been done for us. A creature from that desert world had come along
and thrown us out.
The night that had lain over the white world when we
had been brought there had given way to day. Through the massive doorway, I
could see the faint yellow light of the sun blocked out by the towering
structures of the city.
There was no sign of the hobbies or the gnomelike
humanoid who had picked the world into which the hobbies threw us.
(Clifford D. Simak: "Destiny
Doll",
New York, Putnam 1971)
"(Andy
Spaulding said:) "... In a few years more, all the old and solid
theories about space and time may collapse to nothing, leaving us standing in
the rubble of shattered theories that we then will know are worthless and
always have been worthless...""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special
Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 8)
"(Andy Spaulding said:) "... it would
be a blessing should we be forced to undergo some catastrophic event that would
cause us to change our thinking and to seek another way of life...""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special
Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 10)
|
|
""Have you ever given any thought,"
Andy was asking, "to historic crisis points?" "I
don't believe I ever have," said Lansing. "History
is replete with them," Andy told him. "And upon them, the sum of
them, rests the sort of world we have today. It has occurred to me, at times,
that there may be a number of alternate worlds..."" (Clifford
D. Simak: "Special Deliverance", |
""The hell with it," he (Lansing)
said aloud and dropped the dollar (into the slot). The (slot) machine gulped
it down and made a clanking sound, and the lights came on the dials. He chugged
the lever down, and the dials began their crazy spinning. Then the lights went
out and the machine went away. So did the room as well.
He stood upon a path in a woodland glen. Tall,
massive trees hemmed him in, and from a little distance off he heard the liquid
chatter of a singing brook. Except for the brook there was no sound, and there
was nothing stirring."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 23)
"(Sandra
Carver said:) "I am a certified poetess in the Academy of Very Ancient
Athens and I can speak fourteen tongues, although I only write or sing in one -
one of the dialects of Former Gaul, the most expressive language in the entire
world. How I came here I do not entirely understand. I was listening to a
concert, a new composition played by an orchestra from the Land Across the
Western Sea, and in all my life I've never heard anything so powerful and so
poignant. It seemed to lift me out of my corporeal body and launch my spirit
into another place and when I came back again into my body, both I, my soaring
spirit, and my body were in a different place, a pastoral place of astounding
beauty. There was a path and I followed it and - ".
"The year?" asked the Parson.
"What year, pray?"
"I don't understand your question,
Parson."
"What year was it? Your measurement of
time."
"The sixty-eigth of the Third
Renaissance."
"No, no, I don't mean that. Anno Domini -
the year of Our Lord."
"What lord do you speak of? In my day there
are so many lords."
"How many years since the birth of
Jesus?"
"Jesus?"
"Yes, the Christ."
"Sir, I have never heard of Jesus nor of
Christ."
The Parson appeared on the verge of apoplexy.
His face became red and he pulled at his collar as if fighting for air. He
tried to speak and strangled on his words."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 31-32)
""I
was done in," said Mary, "by, of all things, a blueprint. A fellow
engineer brought it to me, claiming there was something in it that he did not
understand. He insisted I have a look at it, and he pointed with his finger to
where he wanted me to look. It was nothing I had ever seen before and as I
struggled to make some sense of it, I was caught up in the configuration that
was represented on it and the next I knew I was standing in a forest. I am
struck by the coincidence that both Edward and myself were trapped by another
human - in his case a student, in my case another engineer. This would argue
that whoever, or whatever, did this to us has agents on our worlds.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 40)
"(Jurgens said:) "... You spoke of
what your friend had said - I believe you said he babbled. About alternate
worlds, alternate earths splitting off from one another at certain crisis
points. I believe you said that was what may have happened."
(Lansing said:) "Yes, I did. For all its
madness..."
"And those alternate worlds each would
follow its world line. They'd exist simultaneously through time and space.
Would that mean, if we indeed are from different alternate worlds, that all of
us would come from the same time frame?"
"I hadn't thought of that," said
Lansing, "and I don't really know. You understand that this all is
supposition. But if the alternate world theory should be true and we do come
from such worlds, I see no reason to believe we'd all have to be from the same
time frame. Any agency that could put us here probably could be rather
arbitrary about time as well.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special
Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 53-54)
"The night before he (Lansing) and
Jurgens had talked of that, the disparity of time that might be possible in
alternate worlds. It was quite apparent from what Jurgens had told him that the
robot's time had been many thousands of years in the future beyond the time of
Lansing's Earth. Or could the cube be a structure out of time itself, seen only
dimly through the misty veil of otherwhen and otherwhere?..."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 62-63)
"Mary
gripped his (Lansing's) right arm with both her hands.
""Edward," she said, her voice
shaking, "we've found other worlds."
"Other worlds?" he repeated, stupidly.
"There are doors," she said, "and
peepholes through the doors. Look through the peepholes and you see the
world."
She urged him forward and, not quite
comprehending, he came along with her until they stood in front of one of the
circles of light. "Look," she said, enthralled. "Look and see.
That's my favorite world. I like it best of all."
Lansing moved closer and looked through the
peephole.
"I call it the apple-blossom world,"
she said. "The bluebird world."
And he saw.
The world stretched out before him, a quiet and
gentle place with a broad expanse of grass that practically glistened in its
greenness. A sparkling brook ran through the meadow in the middle distance, and
now he saw that the grass was dotted with the pale blue and soft yellow of many
blooming flowers. The yellow flowers looked like daffodils nodding in a breeze.
The blue flowers, not so tall, half hidden in the grass, stared out at him like
so many frightened eyes. On a distant hilltop stood a grove of small pink
trees, covered and obscured by the astonishing pinkness of their blossoms.
"Crabapple trees," said Mary.
"Crabapples bear pink blossoms."
The world had a sense of freshness, as if it
might be only minutes old - washed clean by a careful springtime rain, dried
and scrubbed by a solicitous breeze, burnished to its brightness by the rays of
a gentle sun."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 98)
"The
Parson must have experienced the same sensation, for he said, "This place
is half as old as time and it bears down upon one. As if it is possible to feel
the weight of centuries resting on one's shoulders. Time has eroded its very
stones. It is becoming one with the land on which it stands. Had you, Mr.
Lansing, noticed that?"
"I think I have," said Lansing.
"There's an unusual feel to it."
"It is a place," the Parson said,
"where history has run down, where it has fulfilled itself and died. The
city now stands as a reminder that all things of the flesh are fleeting, that
history itself is no more than illusion...""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 104)
"Lansing
found his body unconsciously responding to the rhythm of the song the machines
were singing, as if his body, all of his body, was responding to its beat. It
seeped into him, formed a background for his life.
It's taking over, he thought, but the thought
came from very far away and did not seem to be a part of him, as if another
person might be thinking it. He recognized the danger of being taken over and
tried to call out a warning to Mary, but the warning took some little time and
before he could cry out, he was another kind of life.
He was light-years tall and each step he took
spanned many trillion miles. He loomed in the universe, his body wispy and
tenuous, a body that flashed like spangles in the glare of flaring suns that
swirled and spun about him. Planets were no more than grating gravels
underneath his feet. When a black hole blocked his way, he kicked it to one side.
He put out his hand to pluck half a dozen quasars and strung them on a strand
of starlight to hang about his neck.
He climbed a hill made of piled-up stars. The
hill was high and steep and required a lot of scrabbling to get up it; in the
process of climbing he dislodged a number of the stars that made up the hill
and, once dislodged, they went clattering down, rolling and bouncing to the
bottom of the hill, except that it had no bottom..."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 123-124)
"(Lansing
said:) "... I climbed a hill made up of shoveled-together stars and,
standing on top of it, I saw the universe, all of the universe, out to the end
of time and space, where time and space pinched out. I saw what lay beyond
time/space, and I don't now remember exactly what I saw. Chaos. Maybe that's
the name for it..." "
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 125-126)
"There
could be no doubt, he (Lansing) told himself, that this place was Earth, but
not the old familiar Earth that he had known. It was not another planet in
another solar system; it was one of the alternate Earths that Andy had talked
about, never for a moment suspecting there could be such other Earths..."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 137-138)
"(Jorgenson
said:) "... I am a time traveler. When I first came to this place I
thought I was just traveling through - which, if that had been the case, would
have seen me long gone from here. It turns out, however, that this is not the
case. Why it's not, I do not know. I'm not at all sure what happened; this is
the first instance that I have been stuck in time.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 145)
"They
(the four card players) were so alike, so like four peas in a pod, that
Lansing could not think of them as four, but only as a single entity, as if the
four were one. He did not know their names. He had never heard their names. He
wondered if they might, in fact, have no names. To distinguish one from the
other, he assigned them identities, mentally tying tags upon them. Starting
from the left, he would think of them as A, B, C and D."
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 208)
"You
know, of course," said A, "about the multiplicity of worlds, worlds
splitting off at crisis points to form still other worlds. And I take you are
acquainted with the evolutionary process."
"We know of evolution," Mary said.
"A system of sorting out to make possible the selection of the
fittest."
"Exactly. If you think about it, you will
see that the splitting off of the alternate worlds is an evolutionary
process."
"You mean for the selection of better
worlds? Don't you have some trouble with the definition of a better
world?"
"Yes, of course we do. That's the reason
you are here. That's the reason we have brought many others here. Evolution, as
such, does not work. It operates on the basis of the development of dominant
life forms. In many cases the survival factors that make for dominance in
themselves are faulty. All of them have flaws; many of them carry the seeds of
their own destruction.""
(Clifford D. Simak: "Special Deliverance",
New York, Ballantine Books (A Del Rey Book) 1982;
p. 210-211)