Clifford Simak - The Thing in the Stone - And Other Stories

Crane walked slowly, scuffing through newly fallen leaves, hat pulled low above his eyes, hands deep in his pocket.

Why should they want anyone to know?

Wouldn’t they be more likely to want no one to know, to keep under cover until it was time to ac, to use the element of surprise in suppressing any opposition that might arise?

Opposition!

That was the answer!

They would want to know what kind of opposition to expect.

And how would one find out the kind of opposition one would run into from an alien race?

Why, said Crane to himself, by testing for reaction response. By prodding an alien and watching what he did. By deducing racial reaction through controlled observation.

So they prodded me, he thought. Me, an average human.

They let me know and now they’re watching what I do.

And what could one do in a case like this?

You could go to the police and say, “I have evidence that machines from outer space have arrived on Earth and are freeing our machines.”

And the police—what would they do?

Give you the drunkometer test, yell for a medic to see if you were sane, wire the FBI to see if you were wanted anywhere and more than likely grill you about the latest murder. Then sock you in the jug until they thought up something else.

You could go to the governor—and the governor, being a politician and a very slick one at that, would give you a polite brush-off.

You could go to Washington and it would take you weeks to see someone. And after you had seen them, the FBI would get your name as a suspicious character to be given periodic checks. And if Congress heard about it and they were not too busy at the moment they would more than likely investigate you.

You could go to the state university and talk to the scientists—or try to talk to them. They could be guaranteed to make you feel an interloper, and an uncurried one at that.

You could go to a newspaper—especially if you were a newspaper man, and you could write a story…

Crane shuddered at the thought of it.

He could imagine what would happen.

People rationalized. They rationalized to reduce the complex to the simple, the unknown to the understandable, the alien to the commonplace. They rationalized to save their sanity—to make the mentally unacceptable concept into something they would live with.

The thing in the cabinet had been a practical joke. McKay had said about the sewing machine, “Have some fun with it.” Out at Harvard there’ll be a dozen theories to explain the disappearance of the electronic brain and learned men will wonder why they never thought of the theories before. And the man who saw the sewing machine? Probably by now, Crane thought, he will have convinced himself that he was stinking drunk.

It was dark when he returned home. The evening paper was a white blob on the porch where the newsboy had thrown it. He picked it up and for a moment, before he let himself into the house, he stood in the dark shadow of the porch and stared up the street.

Old and familiar, it was exactly as it had always been, ever since his boyhood days, a friendly place with a receding line of street lamps and the tall, massive protectiveness of ancient elm trees. On this night there was the smell of smoke from burning leaves drifting down the street and it, like the street, was old and familiar, a recognizable symbol stretching back to first remembrances.

It was symbols such as these, he thought, which spelled humanity and all that made a human life worthwhile—elm trees and leaf smoke, street lamps making splashes on the pavement and the shine of lighted windows seen dimly through the trees.

A prowling cat ran through the shrubbery that flanked the porch and up the street a dog began to howl.

Street lamps, he thought, and hunting cats and howling dogs…these are all a pattern, the pattern of human life upon the planet Earth. A solid pattern, linked and double-linked, made strong through many years. Nothing can threaten it, nothing can shake it. With certain slow and gradual changes, it will prevail against any threat which may be brought against it.

He unlocked the door and went into the house.

The long walk and the sharp autumn air, he realized now, had made him hungry. There was a steak, he remembered, in the refrigerator and he would fix a large bowl of salad and if there were some cold potatoes left he would slice them up and fry them.

The typewriter still stood on the tabletop. The length of pipe still lay upon the drain board. The kitchen was the same old, homey place, untouched by any outer threat of an alien life, come to meddle with the Earth.

He tossed the paper on the tabletop and stood for a moment, head bent, scanning through the headlines.

The black type of the box at the top of column two caught his eye. The head read:

WHO IS

KIDDING

WHOM?

He read the story:

Cambridge, Mass (UP)—Someone pulled a fast one today on Harvard university, the nation’s press services and the editors of all client papers.

A story was carried on the news wires this morning reporting that Harvard’s electronic brain had disappeared.

There was no basis of fact for the story. The brain is still at Harvard. It was never missing. No one knows how the story was placed on the press wires of the various news services but all of them carried it, at approximately the same time.

All parties concerned have started an investigation and it is hoped that an explanation…

Crane straightened up.

Illusion or cover-up?

“Illusion,” he said aloud.

The typewriter clacked at him in the stillness of the kitchen.

Not illusion, Joe, it wrote.

He grasped the table’s edge and let himself down slowly into the chair.

Something scuttled across the dining room floor and as it crossed the streak of light from the kitchen door, Crane caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye.

The typewriter chattered at him.

Joe!

“What?” he asked.

That wasn’t a cat out in the bushes by the porch.

He rose to his feet and went into the dining room, picked the phone out of its cradle. There was no hum. He jiggled the hook. Still there was no hum.

He put the receiver back.

The line had been cut. There was at least one of the things in the house. There was at least one of them outside.

He strode to the front door and jerked it open, then slammed it shut again—and locked and bolted it.

He stood shaking, with his back against it, and wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

“My God,” he told himself, “the yard is boiling with them!”

He went back to the kitchen.

They had wanted him to know.

They had prodded him to see how he would react.

Because they had to know. Before they moved they had to know what to expect in the way of human reactions, what danger they would face, what they had to watch for.

Knowing that, it would be a leadpipe cinch.

And I didn’t react, he told himself. I was a non-reactor. They picked the wrong man. I didn’t do a thing. I didn’t give them so much as a single lead.

Now they will try someone else.

I am no good to them and yet I’m dangerous through my very knowledge. So now they’re going to kill me and try someone else.

That would be logic. That would be the rule.

If one alien fails to react he may be an exception. Maybe just unusually dumb. So let us kill him off and try another one. Try enough of them and you will strike a norm.

Four things, thought Crane.

They might try to kill off the humans and you couldn’t discount the fact they could be successful. The liberated Earth machines would help them and Man, fighting against machines and without the aid of machines, would not fight too effectively. It might take years, of course, but once the forefront of Man’s defense went down, the end could be predicted, with relentless, patient machines tracking down and killing the last of humankind, wiping out the race.