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

“Interesting,” said Kemp, “but a bit out of my line. It suggests many possibilities. Shows the almost endless flexibility of life as such.”

Chambers nodded. “I thought maybe you would have that reaction. It was mine, too, but I’m not an expert on that sort of thing. Monk hints that life form may still exist. Hints at other things, too. He seemed to be upset when he wrote the letter. Almost as if he were on the verge of a discovery he himself couldn’t quite believe. A little frightened at it, even. Not wanting to say too much, you see, until he was absolutely sure.”

“Why should something like that upset him?” demanded Kemp. “It’s information out of the past. Surely something he finds in those old scrolls can’t reach out—”

Chambers lifted his hand. “You haven’t heard it all. The Martians were afraid of that life on the fifth planet, Kemp. Deathly afraid of it! So afraid of it they blew up the planet, blasted it, destroyed it, thinking that in doing so they would wipe out the life it bore.”

Chambers’ face did not change. He did not stir.

“Monk believes they failed,” he said.

The room swam in almost frightened silence. Hannibal stirred uneasily on his perch on Chambers’ shoulder.

“Can you imagine—” Chambers’ voice was almost a whisper. “Can you imagine a fear so great that a race would blow up, destroy another planet to rid themselves of it?”

Kemp shook his head. “It seems rather hard, and yet, given a fear great enough—”

He stopped and shot a sudden look at Chambers. “Why have you bothered to tell me this?” he asked.

“Why, don’t you see?” said Chambers smoothly. “Here might be a new kind of life—a different kind of life, developed millions of years ago under another environment. It might have followed a divergent quirk of development, just some tiny, subtle difference that would provide a key.”

“I see what you’re driving at,” said Kemp. “But not me. Findlay is your man. I haven’t got the time. I’m living on borrowed sanity. And, to start with, you haven’t even got that life. You hardly would know what to look for. An encysted form of life. That could be anything. Send a million men out into the Asteroids to hunt for it and it might take a thousand years.

“The idea is sound, of course. We’ve followed it in other instances, without success. The moon men of Jupiter were no help. Neither were the Venusians. The Martians, of course, were out of the picture to start with. We don’t even know what they were like. Not even a skeleton of them has been found. Maybe the race they were afraid of got them after all—did away with them completely.”

Chambers smiled bleakly. “I should have known it was no use.”

“I’m sorry,” said Kemp. “I have to go to Sanctuary. I’ve seen some others when it happened to them. Johnny Gardner and Smith and Lempke. It’s not going to happen to me that way if I can help it.”

Chambers matched his fingers carefully. “You’ve been in the service a long time, Kemp.”

“Ten years,” said Kemp.

“During those ten years you have worked with scarcely a thought of yourself,” said Chambers quietly. “There is no need to be modest. I know your record. You have held a certain ideal. An ideal for a better Solar System, a better human life. You would have given your right arm to have done something that would actually have contributed to the betterment of mankind. Like finding out what life is, for example. You came here now because you thought what you had to tell might help.”

Kemp sat without speaking.

“Isn’t that it?” insisted Chambers.

“Perhaps it is,” admitted Kemp. “I’ve never thought of it in just those words. To me it was a job.”

“Would you do another job?” asked Chambers. “Another job for mankind? Without knowing why you did it? Without asking any questions?”

Kemp leaped to his feet. “I’ve told you I was going to Sanctuary,” he shouted. “I have done what I can, all I can. You can’t ask me to wait around for—”

“You will go to Sanctuary,” said Chambers sharply.

“But this job—”

“When you go to Sanctuary I want you to take Hannibal along.”

Kemp gasped. “Hannibal?”

“Exactly,” said Chambers. “Without asking me why.”

Kemp opened his mouth to speak, closed it.

“Now?” he finally asked.

“Now,” said Chambers. He rose, lifted Hannibal from his shoulder, placed him on Kemp’s shoulder. Kemp felt the sharp claws digging through his clothing, into his flesh, felt one tiny arm pawing at his neck, seeking a hold.

Chambers patted Hannibal on the head. Tears welled out of his sightless eyes behind the large dark glasses.

Sanctuary was a place of beauty, a beauty that gripped one by the throat and held him, as if against a wall.

Once, a few years ago, Kemp realized, it had been a barren hunk of rock, five miles across at most, tumbling through space on an eccentric orbit. No air, no water—nothing but stark stone that glinted dully when the feeble rays of the distant sun chanced to fall across its surface.

But now it was a garden with lacy waterfalls and singing streams arched by feathery trees in whose branches flitted warbling birds. Cleverly concealed lighting held the black of space at bay and invested the tiny planetoid with a perpetual just-before-dusk, a soft and radiant light that dimmed to purple shadows where the path of flagging ran up the jagged hill crowned by a classic building of shining white plastic.

A garden built by blasting disintegrators that shaped the face of the rock to an architect’s blueprint, that gouged deep wells for the gravity apparatus, that chewed the residue of its labor into the basis for the soil in which the trees and other vegetation grew. A garden made livable by machines that manufactured air and water, that screened out the lashing radiations that move through naked space—and yet no less beautiful because it was man and machine-made.

Kemp hesitated beside a deep, still pool just below a stretch of white-sprayed, singing water crossed by a rustic bridge and drank in the scene that ran up the crags before him. A scene that whispered with a silence made up of little sounds. And as he stood there a deep peace fell upon him, a peace he could almost feel, feel it seeping into his brain, wrapping his body—almost as if it were something he could reach and grasp.

It was almost as if he had always lived here, as if he knew and loved this place from long association. The many black years on Pluto were dimmed into a distant memory and it seemed as if a weight had fallen from his shoulders, from the shoulders of his soul.

A bird twittered sleepily and the water splashed on stones. A tiny breeze brought the swishing of the waterfall that feathered down the cliff and a breath of fragrance from some blooming thing. Far off a bell chimed softly, like a liquid note running on the scented air.

Something scurried in the bushes and scuttled up the path and, looking down, Kemp saw Hannibal and at the sight of the grinning face of the little creature his thoughts were jerked back into pattern again.

“Thank goodness you decided to show up,” said Kemp. “Where you been? What’s the idea of hiding out on me?”

Hannibal grimaced at him.

Well, thought Kemp, that was something less to worry about now. Hannibal was in Sanctuary and technically that carried out the request Chambers had made of him. He remembered the minute of wild panic when, landing at Sanctuary spaceport, he had been unable to find the creature. Search of the tiny one-man ship in which he had come to Sanctuary failed to locate the missing Hannibal, and Kemp had finally given up, convinced that somehow during the past few hours, Chambers’ pet had escaped into space, although that had seemed impossible.