There was a great deal wrong with the Rustic Slicker, and he, Bayard Lodge, knew the Rustic Slicker as he knew no other man—knew the blood and guts and brains of him, knew his thoughts and dreams and his hidden yearnings, his clodhopperish conceit, his smart-aleck snicker, the burning inferiority complex that drove him to social exhibitionism.
He knew him as every member of the audience must know his own character, as something more than an imagined person, as someone more than another person, something more than friend. For the bond was strong—the bond of the created and creator.
And tonight the Rustic Slicker had drawn a little ways apart, had cut the apron strings, stood on his own with the first dawning of independence.
The Philosopher was saying: «It’s quite natural that I should have commented on all of us being here. For one of us is dead…»
There was no gasp from the audience, no hiss of indrawn breath, no stir, but you could feel the tension snap tight like a whining violin string.
«We have been consciences,» said the Mustached Villain. «Projected conscience playing out our parts…»
The Rustic Slicker said: «The consciences of mankind.»
Lodge half rose out of his chair.
I didn’t make him say that! I didn’t want him to say that. I thought it, that was all. So help me God, I just thought it, that was all!
And now he knew what was wrong. At last, he knew the strangeness of the characters this night.
They weren’t on the screen at all! They were on the stage, the little width of stage which ran before the screen!
They were no longer projected imaginations—they were flesh and blood.
They were mental puppets came to sudden life.
He sat there, cold at the thought of it—cold and rigid in the quickening knowledge that by the power of mind alone—by the power of mind and electronic mysteries, Man had created life.
A new approach, Maitland had said.
Oh, Lord! A new approach!
They had failed at their work and triumphed in their play, and there’d be no longer any need of life teams, grubbing down into that gray area where life and death were interchangeable.
To make a human monster you’d sit before a screen and you’d dream him up, bone by bone, hair by hair, brains, innards, special abilities and all.
There’d be monsters by the billions to plant on those other planets. And the monsters would be human, for they’d be dreamed by brother humans working from a blueprint.
In just a little while the characters would step down off the stage and would mingle with them.
And their creators? What would their creators do? Go screaming, raving mad?
What would he say to the Rustic Slicker?
What could he say to the Rustic Slicker?
And, more to the point, what would the Rustic Slicker have to say to him?
He sat, unable to move, unable to say a word or cry out a warning, waiting for the moment when they would step down.
Epilog
Clifford D. Simak, after collecting in the book City the stories that made up the series which, provided with genius-level interstitial materials, went by that name, never intended to do another story set in that «universe.» But after the death of John W. Campbell, Jr., the iconic editor of Astounding, a project was created to make a kind of memorial to a man who had published so many of the great stories of the field. And Cliff was prevailed upon to go back to the universe he had created and, mostly, sold to Campbell in the early 1940s. Cliff never really regarded «Epilog» as part of the «City» series, and initially he refused to allow it to be tacked onto later publications of City . But eventually, faced with repeated requests to combine the book with the last story, he relented on that issue.
His refusal was based on the fact that so much time had passed since the first City stories were published—roughly thirty years—that he felt he was a completely different man, and a completely different writer, from the person who wrote those first stories. City was over, he said; «Epilog» was a different thing.
«Epilog» was originally published, then, in Astounding: The John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, edited by Harry Harrison and published in 1973.
—dww
Things happened all at once on that single day, although what day it might have been is not known, for Jenkins …
As Jenkins walked across the meadow, the Wall came tumbling down …
Jenkins sat on the patio of Webster House and remembered that long-gone day when the man from Geneva had come back to Webster House and had told a little Dog that Jenkins was a Webster, too. And that, Jenkins told himself, had been a day of pride for him …
Jenkins walked across the meadow to commune with the little meadow mice, to become one with them and run for a time with them in the tunnels they had constructed in the grass. Although there was not much satisfaction in it. The mice were stupid things, unknowing and uncaring, but there was a certain warmth to them, a quiet sort of security and well-being, since they lived quite alone in the meadow world and there was no danger and no threat. There was nothing left to threaten them. They were all there were, aside from certain insects and worms that were fodder for the mice.
In time past, Jenkins recalled, he had often wondered why the mice had stayed behind when all the other animals had gone to join the Dogs in one of the cobbly worlds. They could have gone, of course. The Dogs could have taken them, but there had been no wish in them to go. Perhaps they had been satisfied with where they were; perhaps they had a sense of home too strong to let them go.
The mice and I, thought Jenkins. For he could have gone as well. He could go even now if he wished to go. He could have gone at any time at all. But like the mice, he had not gone, but stayed. He could not leave Webster House. Without it, he was only half a being.
So he had stayed and Webster House still stood. Although it would not have stood, he told himself, if it had not been for him. He had kept it clean and neat; he had patched it up. When a stone began to crumble, he had quarried and shaped another and had carefully replaced it, and while it may for a while have seemed new and alien to the house, time took care of that—the wind and sun and weather and the creeping moss and lichens.
He had cut the lawn and tended the shrubs and flower beds. The hedges he’d kept trimmed. The woodwork and the furniture well-dusted, the floors and paneling well-scrubbed—the house still stood. Good enough, he told himself with some satisfaction, to house a Webster if one ever should show up. Although there was no hope of that. The Websters who had gone to Jupiter were no longer Websters, and those at Geneva still were sleeping if, in fact, Geneva and the Websters in it existed any longer.
For the Ants now held the world. They had made of the world one building, or so he had presumed, although he could not really know. But so far as he did know, so far as his robotic senses reached (and they reached far), there was nothing but the great senseless building that the Ants had built. Although to call it senseless, he reminded himself, was not entirely fair. There was no way of knowing what purpose it might serve. There was no way one might guess what purpose the Ants might have in mind.
The Ants had enclosed the world, but had stopped short of Webster House, and why they had done that there was no hint at all. They had built around it, making Webster House and its adjoining acres a sort of open courtyard within the confines of the building—a five-mile circle centered on the hill where Webster House still stood.