Special Deliverance (4 page)

F
IVE PEOPLE, FOUR MEN and a woman, were sitting at a heavy oak table in front of a blazing fireplace. When Lansing came through the door and closed it behind him, all of them turned their heads to look at him. One of them, a grossly fat man, levered himself from his chair and waddled across the room to greet him.

“Professor Lansing, we are so glad that you have arrived,” he said. “We have been worrying about you. There is still one other. We hope nothing has befallen her.”

“One other? You knew that I was coming?”

“Oh, yes, some hours ago. I knew when you started out.”

“I fail to understand,” said Lansing. “No one could have known.”

“I am your host,” said the fat man. “I operate this dingy inn as best I can for the comfort and convenience of those who travel in these parts. Please, sir, come over to the fire and warm yourself. The Brigadier, I am sure, will give you his chair next to the hearth stone.”

“Most happily,” said the Brigadier. “I am slightly singed from sitting here so snug against the blaze.”

He rose, a portly man of commanding figure. As he moved, the firelight glinted off the medals pinned upon his tunic.

Lansing murmured, “I thank you, sir.”

But before he could move to take the chair, the door opened and a woman stepped into the room.

Mine Host waddled forward a step or two to greet her.

“Mary Owen,” he said. “You are Mary Owen? We are so glad you’re here.”

“Yes, I am Mary Owen,” said the woman. “And I am more glad to be here than you are to have me. But can you tell me where I am?”

“Most assuredly,” said Mine Host. “You are at the Cockadoodle Inn.”

“What a strange name for an inn,” said Mary Owen.

“As for that I cannot say,” said Mine Host. “I had no hand in naming it. It was already named when I came here. As you may note, it is an ancient place. It has sheltered, in its time, many noble folk.”

“What place is this?” asked Mary Owen. “I mean the country. What is this place—what nation, what province, what country?”

“Of that I can tell you nothing,” said Mine Host. “I have never heard a name.”

“And I have never heard of such a thing,” said Mary. “A man who knows not where he lives.”

“Madam,” said the man dressed all in black who stood next to the Brigadier, “it is passing strange indeed. He is not making sport of you. He told the same to us.”

“Come in, come in,” urged Mine Host. “Move closer to the fire. The gentlemen who have been here for some time, soaking up the heat, will make way for you and Professor Lansing. And now that we all are here, I shall go into the kitchen and see how supper’s doing.”

He waddled off in hurried fashion and Mary Owen came over to stand beside Lansing.

“Did I hear him call you professor?” she asked.

“Yes, I think he did. I wish he hadn’t. I’m seldom called professor. Even my students—”

“But you are one, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am. I teach at Langmore College.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a small school in New England.”

The Brigadier spoke to the two of them. “Here are two chairs next to the fire. The Parson and I have held them overlong.”

“Thank you, General,” said Mary.

The man who had been sitting quietly opposite the Brigadier and the Parson rose and touched Lansing gently on the arm.

“As you can see,” he said, “I am not a human. Would you take it unkindly if I welcomed you to our little circle?”

“Why, no—” said Lansing, then stopped to stare at the welcomer. “You are…”

“I am a robot, Mr. Lansing. You’ve not seen one before?”

“No, I never have.”

“Oh, well, there are not many of us,” the robot said, “and we’re not on all the worlds. My name is Jurgens.”

“I’m sorry I had not noticed you before,” said Lansing. “Despite the fire, the room is rather dun and there was a good deal going on.”

“Would you, Mr. Lansing, be, by any chance, a crackpot?”

“I don’t think so, Jurgens. I have never thought about it. Why do you ask?”

“I have a hobby,” said the robot, “of collecting crackpots. I have one who thinks he’s God whenever he gets drunk.”

“That lets me out,” said Lansing. “Drunk or sober, I never think I’m God.”

“Ah,” said Jurgens, “that’s but one road crackpottery can take. There are many others.”

“I have no doubt there are,” said Lansing.

The Brigadier took it upon himself to introduce all the people at the table. “I am Everett Darnley,” he said. “Brigadier for Section Seventeen. The man standing next to me is Parson Ezra Hatfield, and the lady at the table is Poetess Sandra Carver. The one standing next to Mr. Lansing is the robot Jurgens. And now that we all know one another, let us take our seats and imbibe some of the pleasing liquor that has been set out for us. The three humans of us have been sampling it and it is passing good.”

Lansing came around the table and sat in a chair next to Mary Owen. The table, he saw, was of solid oak and yeoman carpentry. Three flaring candles had been placed upon it, and on it as well were three bottles and a tray of mugs. Now for the first time he saw the others in the room. At a table in a far corner sat four men intent on a game of cards.

The Brigadier pulled two mugs in front of him and poured from one of the bottles. He passed one of the mugs to Mary and slid the other across the table to Lansing.

“I hope the supper now in preparation,” he said, “shall prove as tasty as these potables.”

Lansing tasted. The liquor went down smoothly with a comforting warmth. He settled more solidly in the chair and took a long pull at the mug.

“We had been sitting here before you came,” the Brigadier said to Mary and Lansing, “wondering if, when the other two arrived—which are the two of you—they might have some idea of what is going on. It’s apparent from what you said, Miss Owen, that you don’t. How about you, Lansing?”

“Not an inkling,” said Lansing.

“Our host claims that he knows nothing,” said the Parson, speaking sourly. “He says he only operates the inn and that he asks no questions. Principally, I gather, because there is no one to ask questions of. I think the man is lying.”

“You judge him too quickly and too harshly,” said the poetess, Sandra Carver. “He has an honest and an open face.”

“He looks like a pig,” the Parson said. “And he allows abominations to take place beneath his roof. Those men playing cards—”

“You’ve been slopping up the booze,” said the Brigadier, “mug for mug with me.”

“Drinking is no sin,” the Parson said. “The Bible says a little wine for the stomach’s sake…”

“Pal,” said the Brigadier. “This stuff isn’t wine.”

“Perhaps if we calmed down a bit and compared what we know of the situation,” said Mary, “we might arrive at some understanding. Who exactly are we and how we got here and any thoughts we may have upon the matter.”

“That is the first sensible thing that anyone has said,” the Parson told them. “Has anyone objection to telling who they are?”

“I have none,” said Sandra Carver, speaking so softly that the others were forced to listen closely to catch her words. “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-eighth 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.

“I’m sorry if I have distressed you,” said the poetess. “I did it unknowingly. I would not willingly cause offense.”

“It’s all right, my dear,” said the Brigadier. “It’s only that our friend the Parson is suffering culture shock. Before all this is over he may not be the only one. I begin to catch a glint of the situation in which we find ourselves. It is, for me, entirely unbelievable, but as we go on it may become at least marginally believable, although I have the feeling that most of us may come to that realization with a great deal of difficulty.”

“You are saying,” said Lansing, “that all of us may come from different cultures and perhaps from different worlds, although I am not sure about the worlds.” Surprised to hear himself speaking so and thinking back to the time, a few hours before, when Andy Spaulding, speculating idly and certainly meaning none of it, had prattled about alternate worlds, although, he recalled, he had blanked out the prattle.

“But we all speak English,” said Mary Owen, “or we can speak English. How many languages, Sandra, did you say you spoke?”

“Fourteen,” said the poetess. “Some of them rather badly.”

“Lansing voiced a good preliminary grasp of what may have happened to us,” said the Brigadier. “I congratulate you, sir, on your sharp perception. It may not be exactly as you say, but you may be nibbling close to truth. As to the English that we speak, let us speculate a little further. We are one little band, all speaking English. Might there not be other bands? French bands, Latin bands, Greek bands, Spanish bands—small groups of people who can get along together because they speak a common language?”

The Parson shouted, “That is sheer speculation! It is madness to suggest, to even think, of such a concept as the two of you seem to be putting together. It goes against everything that is known of Heaven or of Earth.”

“The knowledge that we have of Heaven and of Earth,“ the Brigadier said, tartly, ”is a mere pinch against the entire truth. We cannot blink our being here, and certainly our being here and the method of our coming does not square with any knowledge that we have.”

“I think that what Mr. Lansing told us…” said Mary. “Lansing, what is your Christian name? We can’t go on calling you Lansing.”

“My name is Edward.”

“Thank you. I think that Edward’s suggestion may be a tad romantic, even visionary. But if we are to seek the knowledge of where we are and the reason for our being here, it would seem that we may be forced to strike out in some new directions in our thinking. I happen to be an engineer, and I live in a highly technical society. Any sort of thinking that projects itself beyond the known or the solidly theoretical grates upon my nerves. There is nothing in any methodology that I can summon up that would provide any explanation. There may be others of you who are better based to suggest an explanation. How about our robot friend?”

“I also have a technical background,” said Jurgens, “but I am not aware of any methodology—”

“Why do you ask him?” shouted the Parson. “You call him a robot and that is a word that slips easily off the tongue, but when you come right down to it, he is no more than a machine, a mechanical contrivance.”

“You go too far,” said the Brigadier. “I happen to live in a world where mechanical contrivances have fought a war for years and have fought it intelligently and well, with an imagination that sometimes surpasses a human’s.”

“How horrible,” said the poetess.

“You mean, I suppose,” said the Brigadier, “that war is horrible.”

“Well, isn’t it?” she asked.

“War is a natural human function,” said the Brigadier. “There is an aggressive, competitive urge in the race that responds to conflict. If this were not so, there would not have been so many wars.”

“But the human suffering. The agony. The blasted hopes.”

“In my day it has become a game,” said the Brigadier. “As it was with many early human tribes. The Indians of the Western Continent looked upon it as a game. A young tribesman did not become a man until he’d counted his first coup. All that is manly and noble stems from war. There might have been times in the past when excessive zeal resulted in some of the consequences that you mention. Today little blood is spilled. We play it as one plays a game of chess.”

“Using robots,” said Jurgens.

“We don’t call them robots.”

“Perhaps not. Mechanicals. Mechanicals that have personal identity and the ability to think.”

“That’s correct. Well built, magnificently trained. They help us plan as well as fight. My staff is very heavily weighed with mechanicals. In many ways their grasp of a military situation is at times superior to mine.”

“And the field of battle is littered with mechanicals?”