New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) Read Online Free PDF Page A

all to himself, and on his favorite trout stream.
    It would be wonderful, he thought, if he only could accept it.
    He hitched the chair around so he could face the fire. He had always liked a fire.
    Such a pleasant place, he thought, and such thoughtful service. He wished that he could stay.
    And what was there to stop him? No one would mind if he did not return. In a day or two he could make his way out to Pineview and mail a couple of letters that would fix it so no one would hunt for him.
    But it was madness, he thought. What if he got sick? What if he fell and hurt himself? He could not reach a doctor and there would be no one to help him.
    Then he thought of how he’d hunted for an aspirin and there had been no aspirin. And how he’d crawled into bed with a twisted, swollen ankle that had been all right when he got up in the morning.
    He had no worry, he realized, about ever being sick.
    There had been no aspirin tablet because there had been no need of any.
    This house was not a house alone. It was more than just a house. It was a shelter and a servant and a doctor. It was a safe and antiseptic house and it was compassionate.
    It gave you everything you wanted. It fulfilled your every need. It gave you fire and food and comfort and a sense of being cared for.
    There were the books, he thought. The rows and stacks of books, the very kind of books by which he’d lived for years.
    Dr. Frederick Gray, dean of the school of law. Filled with honor and importance until he got too old, until his wife and son had died and all his friends were gone or incapacitated. Now no longer dean, now no longer scholar, but an old man with a name that was buried in the past.
    He rose slowly from the chair and went into the study. He put out his hand and rubbed the palm of it along the leathery spines of a row of books.
    These were the friends, he told himself, the friends a man could count on. They always were in place and waiting for the time a man might need them.
    He stopped in front of the section that had puzzled him at first, which he had thought of as a farfetched joke. But now he knew there was no joke.
    He read the titles of a few of them: “Basic Statutes of Arcturus XXIV,” “Comparison of the Legal Concepts of the Centaurian Systems,” “Jurisprudence on Zubeneschamali III, VI and VII,” “The Practical Law of Canopus XII.” And many others with the strange names in their titles.
    Perhaps, he thought, he would not have recognized the names so readily had it not been for Ben. For years he had listened to him talk about his work, reeling off many of these very names as if they might be places no farther off than just down the street a ways.
    And maybe, thought Frederick Gray, they were not so far, at that. All he had to do to talk to men—no, not men, perhaps, but beings—in all of these strange places was to walk out into the hall and dial their numbers on the phone.
    A telephone directory, he thought, with numbers for the stars, and on all these shelves law books from the stars.
    Perhaps there were, on those other solar systems, nothing like a telephone or a telephone directory; perhaps, on those other planets there weren’t any law books. But here on Earth, he told himself, the means of communication had to be a telephone, the means of information books upon the shelf. For all of it had to be a matter of translation, twisting the unfamiliar into something that was familiar and that one could use. And translation not for Earth alone, but for all those other beings on all those other planets. On each of a dozen planets there might be a different means of communication, but in the case of a call to him from any of those planets, no matter what means the creature of the planet might employ, the telephone would ring.
    And the names of those other stars would be translations, too. For the creatures who lived upon the planets circling Polaris would not call their sun Polaris. But here on Earth it had to be Polaris, for