The Servant Problem - Robert F. Young (top fiction books of all time .TXT) 📗

Profession Inventor. On the first day of April of the year of our Lord, 1962, Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger brought into being a Möbius coincidence field and established multiple contact with the twenty-first satellite of the star Sirius, thereby giving the people of Valleyview access, via their back doorways, to a New World. Here we have come to live. Here we have come to raise our children. Here, in this idyllic village, which the noble race that once inhabited this fair planet left behind them when they migrated to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, we have settled down to create a new and better Way of Life. Here, thanks to Francis Farnsworth Pfleuger, we shall know happiness prosperity and freedom from fear.

FRANCIS FARNSWORTH PFLEUGER, WE, THE NEW INHABITANTS OF SIRIUS XXI, SALUTE YOU!

Philip wiped his forehead again.

Presently he noticed that the flesh-and-blood Francis Pfleuger was looking in his direction. “Me,” the flesh-and-blood Francis Pfleuger said, pointing proudly at the statue. “Me.”

“So I gather,” Philip said dryly. And then. “Zarathustra—come back here!”

The little dog had started down one of the paths that converged on the statue. At Philip's command, he stopped but did not turn; instead he remained where he was, as though waiting for someone to come down the path. After a moment, someone did—Judith Darrow.

She was wearing a simple white dress, reminiscent both in design and décor of a Grecian tunic. A wide gilt belt augmented the effect, and her delicate sandals did nothing to mar it. In the radiance of the star-flowers, her eyes were more gray than green. There were shadows under them, Philip noticed, and the lids were faintly red.

She halted a few feet from him and looked at him without saying a word. “I … I brought your dog back,” he said lamely. “I found him in the back seat of my car.”

“Thank you. I've been looking all over Pfleugersville for him. I left my Valleyview doors open, hoping he'd come home of his own accord, but I guess he had other ideas. Now that you've discovered our secret, Mr. Myles, what do you think of our brave new world?”

“I think it's lovely,” Philip said, “but I don't believe it's where you seem to think it is.”

“Don't you?” she asked. “Then suppose you show me the full moon that rose over Valleyview tonight. Or better yet, suppose I show you something else.” She pointed to a region of the heavens just to the left of the statue's turned-up nose. “You can't see them from here,” she said, “but around that insignificant yellow star, nine planets are in orbit. One of them is Earth.”

“But that's impossible!” he objected. “Consider the—”

“Distance? In the sort of space we're dealing with, Mr. Myles, distance is not a factor. In Möbius space—as we have come to call it for lack of a better term—any two given points are coincidental, regardless of how far apart they may be in non-Möbius space. But this becomes manifest only when a Möbius coincidence-field is established. As you probably know by now, Francis Pfleuger created such a field.”

At the mention of his name, Francis Pfleuger came hurrying over to where they were standing. “E,” he declared, “equals mc².”

“Thank you, Francis,” Judith said. Then, to Philip, “Shall we walk?”

They started down one of the converging paths, Zarathustra bringing up the rear. Behind them, Francis returned to his Narcissistic study of himself in stone. “We were neighbors back in Valleyview,” Judith said, “but I never dreamed he thought quite so much of himself. Ever since we put up that statue last week, he's been staring at it night and day. Sometimes he even brings his lunch with him.”

“He seems to be familiar with Einstein.”

“He's not really, though. He memorized the energy-mass equation in an attempt to justify his new status in life, but he hasn't the remotest notion of what it means. It's ironic in a way that Pfleugersville should have been discovered by someone with an IQ of less than seventy-five.”

“No one with an IQ of less than seventy-five could create the sort of field you were talking about.”

“He didn't create it deliberately—he brought it into being accidentally by means of a machine he was building to tie knots with. Or at least that's what he says. But we do know that there was such a machine because we saw its fused parts in his kitchen, and there's no question but what it was the source of the field. Francis, though, can't remember how he made the parts or how he put them together. As a matter of fact, to this day he still doesn't understand what happened—though I have a feeling that he knows more than he lets on.”

“What did happen?” Philip asked.

For a while Judith was silent. Then, “All of us promised solemnly not to divulge our secret to an outsider unless he was first accepted by the group as a whole,” she said. “But thanks to my negligence, you know most of it already, so I suppose you're entitled to know the rest.” She sighed. “Very well—I'll try to explain….”

When Francis Pfleuger's field had come into being, something had happened to the back doors of Valleyview that caused them to open upon a planet which one of the local star-gazers promptly identified as Sirius XXI. The good folk of Valleyview had no idea of how such a state of affairs could exist, to say nothing of how it could have come about, till one of the scientists whom they asked to join them as a part of the plan which they presently devised to make their forthcoming utopia self-sufficient, came up with a theory that explained everything.

According to his theory, the round-trip distance between any two planetary or stella bodies was curved in the manner of a Möbius strip—i.e., a strip of paper given a half-twist before bringing the two ends together. In this case, the strip represented the round-trip distance from Earth to Sirius XXI. Earth was represented on the strip by one dot, and Sirius XXI by another, and, quite naturally, the two dots were an equal distance—or approximately 8.8 light years—apart. This brought them directly opposite one another—one on one side of the strip, the other on the other side; but since a Möbius strip has only one surface—or side—the two dots were actually occupying the same space at the same time. In “Möbius space”, then, Earth and Sirius XXI were “coincidental”.

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