Robert F. Young by The Servant Problem

Author:The Servant Problem
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-17T20:28:11+00:00

* * *

Philip looked over his shoulder at the little yellow sun twinkling in the sky. “Common sense,” he said, “tells me differently.”

“Common sense is a liar of the first magnitude,” Judith said. “It has misled man ever since he first climbed down from the trees. It was common sense that inspired Ptolemy’s theory of cosmogony. It was common sense that inspired the burning of Giordano Bruno….”

The fact that common sense indicated that 8.8 light years separated Earth and Sirius XXI in common-sense reality didn’t prove that 8.8 light years separated them in a form of reality that was outside common-sense’s dominion—i.e., Möbius space—and Francis Pfleuger’s field had demonstrated as much. The back-door nodal areas which it had established, however, were merely limited manifestations of that reality—in other words, the field had merely provided limited access to a form of space that had been in existence all along.

“Though why,” Judith concluded, “our back doors should have been affected rather than our front doors, for example, is inexplicable—unless it was because Francis built the machine in his kitchen. In any event, when they did become nodal areas, they manifested themselves on Sirius XXI, and the dogs in the immediate vicinity associated them with the doorways of their departed masters and began whining to be let in.”

“Their departed masters?”

“The race that built this village. The race that built the factories and developed the encompassing farms. A year ago, according to the records they left behind them, they migrated to the Greater Magellanic Cloud.”

Philip was indignant. “Why didn’t they take their dogs with them?”

“They couldn’t. After all, they had to leave their cars and their furniture behind them too, not to mention almost unbelievable stockpiles of every metal imaginable that will last us for centuries. The logistics of space travel make taking even an extra handkerchief along a calculated risk. Anyway, when their dogs ‘found’ us, they were overjoyed, and as for us, we fell in love with them at first sight. Our own dogs, though, didn’t take to them at all, and every one of them ran away.”

“This can’t be the only village,” Philip said. “There must be others somewhere.”

“Undoubtedly there are. All we know is that the people who built this one were the last to leave.”

The park was behind them now, and they were walking down a pleasant street. “And when you and your neighbors discovered the village, did you decide to become expatriates right then and there?” Philip asked.

She nodded. “Do you blame us? You’ve seen for yourself what a lovely place it is. But it’s far more than that. In Valleyview, we had unemployment. Here, there is work for everyone, and a corresponding feeling of wantedness and togetherness. True, most of the work is farmwork, but what of that? We have every conceivable kind of machine to help us in our tasks. Indeed, I think that the only machine the Sirians lacked was one that could manufacture food out of whole cloth. But consider the most important advantage

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.