Read Online All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak - Free Book Online

this other you?”
    He nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “I wonder how you guessed.”
    I gestured at the phone without a dial.
    He grimaced. “I’ve never used the thing,” he said. “Until you told me about the one you found waiting in your office, I never knew anyone who had. I make them by the hundreds …”
    â€œYou make them!”
    â€œYes, of course I do. Not for myself. For this second self. Although,” he said, leaning across the desk and lowering his voice to a confidential tone, “I’m beginning to suspect it’s not a second self.”
    â€œWhat do you think it is?”
    He leaned slowly back in the chair. “Damned if I know,” he said. “There was a time I thought about it and wondered at it and worried over it, but there was no way of knowing. I just don’t bother any more. I tell myself there may be others like me. Maybe I am not alone—at least, it’s good to think so.”
    â€œBut the phone?” I asked.
    â€œI designed the thing,” he said. “Or perhaps this other person, if it is a person, did. I found it in my mind and I put it down on paper. And I did this, mind you, without knowing what it was or what it was supposed to do. I knew it was a phone of some sort, naturally. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, see how it could work. And neither could any of the others who put it into production at the plant. By all the rules of reason, the damn thing shouldn’t work.”
    â€œBut you said there were a lot of other things that seemed to have no purpose.”
    â€œA lot of them,” he said, “but with them I never drew a blueprint, I never tried to make them. But the phone, if that is what you want to call it, was a different proposition. I knew that I should make them and how many might be needed and what to do with them.”
    â€œWhat did you do with them?”
    â€œI shipped them to an outfit in New Jersey.”
    It was utterly insane.
    â€œLet me get this straight,” I pleaded. “You found the blueprints in your head and you knew you should make these phones and that you should send them to some place in New Jersey. And you did it without question?”
    â€œOh, certainly with question. I felt somewhat like a fool. But consider this: this second self, this auxiliary brain, this contact with something else had never let me down. It had saved my business, it had provided good advice, it had never failed me. You can’t turn your back on something that has played good fairy to you.”
    â€œI think I see,” I said.
    â€œOf course you do,” he told me. “A gambler rides his luck. An investor plays his hunches. And neither luck nor hunch are as solid and consistent as this thing I have.”
    He reached out and picked up the dialless phone and looked at it, then set it down again. “I brought this one home,” he said, “and put it on the desk. All these years I’ve waited for a call, but it never came.”
    â€œWith you,” I told him, “there is no need of any phone.”
    â€œYou think that’s it?” he asked.
    â€œI’m sure of it.”
    â€œI suppose it is,” he said. “At times it’s confusing.”
    â€œThis Jersey firm?” I asked. “You corresponded with them?”
    He shook his head. “Not a line. I just shipped the phones.”
    â€œThere was no acknowledgement?”
    â€œNo acknowledgement,” he said. “No payment. I expected none. When you do business with yourself …”
    â€œYourself! You mean this second self runs that New Jersey firm?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said. “Christ, I don’t know anything. I’ve lived with it all these years and I tried to understand, but I never understood.”
    And now his face was haunted and I felt sorry for him.
    He must have noticed that I felt sorry for him. He laughed