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

“Our records show the whole party dropped out of sight. Listed as lost. All the rest of them still are lost so far as anybody knows.

“I tried to get in touch with Nichols and couldn’t do it. There’s no way to reach him. No mail service. No radio service. Nothing. Sanctuary is isolated. If you want anything there, you go there personally, yourself.”

“I hadn’t realized that,” said Chambers.

“Neither does anyone else,” declared Allen. “No one tries to get in touch with Sanctuary unless they need their services and if they need their services they go there. But you haven’t heard the half of it.”

Allen lit a cigarette. A clock chimed softly in the room, and Hannibal, leaning out from the desk, took a swipe at Allen, missed him by bare inches.

The Secret Service man leaned back in his chair. “So, since I couldn’t get in touch with Nichols, I sent some of my men out to Sanctuary. Six of them, in fact, at different times—”

He looked at Chambers, face grim.

“They didn’t come back.”

Chambers started slightly. “They didn’t come back. You mean—”

“I mean just that. They didn’t come back. I sent them out. Then nothing happened. No word from them. No word of them. They simply disappeared. That was three months ago.”

“It seems incredible,” declared Chambers. “Never for a moment have we worried about curing or caring for the men who went insane. Sanctuary did that, we thought. Better than anyone else could.”

He shot a sudden question. “They do cure them, don’t they?”

“Certainly,” said Allen. “Certainly, they cure them. I’ve talked with many they have cured. But those they cure never go back into Solar Service. They are—”

He wrinkled his brow. “It’s hard to put into words, chief. They seem to be different people. Their behavior patterns don’t check against their former records. They have forgotten most of their former skills and knowledge. They aren’t interested in things they were interested in before. They have a funny look in their eyes. They—”

Chambers waved a hand. “You have to realize they would be changed. The treatment might—”

“Yes, I know,” interrupted Allen. “Your reaction is just the same as mine was—as everyone else’s would be. It’s instinctive to protect Sanctuary, to offer apology for it. Because, you see, every last one of us, some day may need to go there. And knowing that it’s there, we feel reassured. Maybe we go batty. So what? Sanctuary will fix us up O.K. Won’t cost us a cent if we haven’t got the money. Even free transportation if we haven’t got the fare. It’s something to anchor to in this mad world. A sort of faith, even. It’s tough to have it knocked from under you.”

Chambers shook his head. “I’m almost sorry you started this business, Moses.”

Allen rose, smashed out his cigarette in a tray.

“I was afraid you’d be. I hate to drop it now I’ve gone this far. It may fizzle out, but—”

“No,” said Chambers, “don’t drop it. We can’t afford to drop anything these days. You, yourself, feel almost instinctively, that it will come to nothing, but on the outside chance it may not, you must go ahead.”

“There’s just one thing more, chief,” said Allen. “I’ve mentioned it before. The people—”

Chambers flipped impatient hands. “I know what you’re going to say, Moses. They resent me. They think I’ve drawn away from them. There have been too many rumors.”

“They don’t know you’re blind,” said Allen. “They’d understand if they did know that. Better for them to know the truth than to think all the things they’re thinking. I know what they’re thinking. It’s my business to know.”

“Who would follow a blind man?” asked Chambers bitterly. “I’d gain their pity, lose their respect.”

“They’re baffled,” said Allen. “They talk about your illness, say it has changed you, never realizing it left you blind. They even say your brain is going soft. They wonder about Hannibal, ask why you never are without him. Fantastic tales have grown up about him. Even more fantastic than the truth.”

“Moses,” said Chambers, sharply, “we will talk no more about this.”

He sat stiff and straight in his chair, staring straight ahead, as Allen left.

Mrs. Templefinger’s parties always were dull. That was a special privilege she held as society leader of New York’s upper crust.

This party was no exception. The amateurish, three-dimensional movies of her trip to the Jovian moons had been bad enough, but the violinist was worse.

Cabot Bond, publisher of the Morning Spaceways, fidgeted in his chair, then suddenly relaxed and tried to look at ease as he caught Mrs. Templefinger glaring at him. She might be a snooty old dame, he told himself, and a trial to all her friends with her determined efforts to uphold the dignity of one of the Solar System’s greatest families, but it definitely was not policy to vex her. She controlled too many advertising accounts.

Cabot Bond knew about advertising accounts. He lived by them and for them. And he worried about them. He was worrying about one of them now.

The violin wailed to a stop and the guests applauded politely. The violinist bowed condescendingly. Mrs. Templefinger beamed, fingering her famous rope of Asteroid jewels so the gems caught light and gleamed with slow ripples of alien fire.

The man next to Bond leaned close.

“Great story that—about discovering the Rosetta stone of Mars,” he said. “Liked the way your paper handled it. Lots of background. Interpretative writing. None of the sensationalism some of the other papers used. And you put it on the front page, too. The Rocket stuck it away on an inside page.”

Bond wriggled uncomfortably. That particular story he’d just as soon forget. At least he didn’t want to talk about it. But the man apparently expected an answer.

“It wasn’t a stone,” Bond said icily, almost wishing the violin would start up again. “It was a scroll.”

“Greatest story of the century,” said the man, entirely unabashed. “Why, it will open up all the ancient knowledge of Mars.”

The violin shrieked violently as the musician sawed a vicious bow across the strings.

Bond settled back into his chair, returned to his worry once again.

Funny how Sanctuary, Inc. had reacted to that story about the Rosetta scroll of Mars. Almost as if they had been afraid to let it come before the public eye. Almost, although this seemed ridiculous, as if they might have been afraid of something that might be found in some old Martian record.

Perhaps he had been wrong in refusing their request to play the story down. Some of the other papers, like the Rocket, apparently had agreed. Others hadn’t, of course, but most of those were sheets which never had carried heavy Sanctuary lineage, didn’t stand to lose much. Spaceways did carry a lot of lineage. And it worried Bond.

The violin was racing now, a flurry of high-pitched notes, weaving a barbaric, outlandish pattern—a song of outer space, of cold winds on strange planets, of alien lands beneath unknown stars.

Mrs. Templefinger’s sudden scream rang through the room, cutting across the shrilling of the music.

“My jewels!” she screamed. “My jewels!”

She had surged to her feet, one hand clutching the slender chain that encircled her throat. The chain on which the Asteroid jewels had been strung.

But now the famous jewels were gone, as if some hand of magic had stripped them from the chain and whisked them into nowhere.

The violinist stood motionless, bow poised, fingers hovering over the strings. A glass tinkled as it slipped from someone’s fingers and struck the floor.