One Was Stubbron Read Free Page B

splashgun,” I said. “I don’t have to believe in you to do it.”
    â€œAh! And there you are wrong. If you kill yourself, you will not share. Is there no way to convince you that our precepts are the only precepts?”
    â€œI can grow cabbage,” I said. “And I can milk cows. And I have stayed healthy so far by not listening to anybody on the subject of anything. You are wasting your time with me.”
    â€œYou mean you refuse?”
    â€œI guess that’s what I mean.”
    â€œYou are a very stubborn man.”
    â€œI believe what I want to believe. I believe this is a world. And anybody that tries to tell me that this glass and bottle are not real is going to get an awful argument from me.”
    â€œThen,” said George Smiley, the Messiah, “my hand is forced. I sent no minions. I came myself. You are the last man. I and the rest of the Universe shall cease to believe in your soul and you shall cease to exist. Good day.”
    â€œGood day,” I said.
    He looked back once from the door. I was trying to pour myself a drink but the bottle neck chattered against the glass and the Old Space Ranger spilled. I felt his eyes.
    And then there weren’t a bottle and a glass in my hands!
    I held nothing!
    â€œGood day,” he said again in a cheerful voice. He was gone.
    D uring the remainder of that day I did nothing more than sit and look at the patterns in the fluffoplex floor. I was half angry, half scared, and I was trying my best to understand just what George Smiley, the Messiah, was doing. I have been told that I have a suspicious nature. However that may be, I suspected George Smiley. Every person I had seen for weeks, now that I came to think about it, had had that same strange fixity of expression which my wife had borne; just as though everyone had become a saint.
    It was much against my principles to surrender to the extent of examining the problem but, at last, when night—as I thought—had come, I went into the next room and fumbled around until I found what papers my wife had accumulated during the past month or two. I sat and read, then, for nearly two hours.
    But at the end of that time I was not even close to a solution. All I discovered was that George Smiley had come from Arcton with a message. Of course, I knew that everyone in the Universe was bored and would welcome any kind of diversion and that such a time, according to my Tribbon’s Rise and Fall of the American Empire, provided unscrupulous men with a host of willing dupes for religious experimentation. That many of these had been maniacs was a fact which Tribbon, the great unbeliever, italicized. But, so far in history, no one man had managed to swing a nation, much less the Universe, around to his method of thinking. But it had been so long since any man had had to develop an original idea that almost any idea would have been acceptable. I suppose that it was the perfection of communication which made it possible for George Smiley to reach everyone everywhere. And the freedom which the Machine Magistration gave all religious exponents accounted for George Smiley’s not being stopped.
    And, worse luck, it seemed that I was the only man left that didn’t want to slip off into the limbo.
    It had already been proved that mass concentration could do away with material objects but that fact was so old that, until now, it had lain dormant except in the pranks of schoolboys who, learning about it for the first time, vanished desks out from in front of their professors.
    George Smiley, according to these reports, was a virile fellow who had lived alone for years and years as a prospector on Arcton. But the fact that his parents were not known made me believe that perhaps both his father and his mother had finished this life as members of the famous Arcton Prison to which so many universal criminals were shipped. Did this George Smiley have a grudge against the whole