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

“So you hid out somewhere,” Kemp said. “Scared they’d find you, maybe, and refuse to let you in. You needn’t have worried, though, for they didn’t pay any attention to me or to the ship. Just gave me a parking ticket and pointed out the path.”

He stooped and reached for Hannibal, but the creature backed away into the bushes.

“What’s the matter with you?” snapped Kemp. “You were chummy enough until just—”

His voice fell off, bewildered. He was talking to nothing. Hannibal was gone.

For a moment Kemp stood on the path, then turned slowly and started up the hill. And as he followed the winding trail that skirted the crags, he felt the peace of the place take hold of him again and it was as if he walked an old remembered way, as if he begrudged every footstep for the beauty that he left behind, but moved on to a newer beauty just ahead.

He met the old man halfway up the hill and stood aside because there was not room for both to keep the path. For some reason the man’s brown robe reaching to his ankles and his bare feet padding in the little patches of dust that lay among the stones, even his flowing white beard did not seem strange, but something that fitted in the picture.

“Peace be on you,” the old man said, and then stood before him quietly, looking at him out of calm blue eyes.

“I welcome you to Sanctuary,” the old man said. “I have something for you.”

He thrust his hand into a pocket of his robe and brought out a gleaming stone, held it toward Kemp.

Kemp stared at it.

“For you, my friend,” the old man insisted.

Kemp stammered. “But it’s … it’s an Asteroid jewel.”

“It is more than that, Harrison Kemp,” declared the oldster. “It is much more than that.”

“But even—”

The other spoke smoothly, unhurriedly. “You still react as you did on Earth—out in the old worlds, but here you are in a new world. Here values are different, standards of life are not the same. We do not hate, for one thing. Nor do we question kindness, rather we expect it—and give it. We are not suspicious of motives.”

“But this is a sanitarium,” Kemp blurted out. “I came here to be treated. Treated for insanity.”

A smile flicked at the old man’s lips. “You are wondering where you’ll find the office and make arrangements for treatment.”

“Exactly,” said Kemp.

“The treatment,” declared the oldster, “already has started. Somewhere along this path you found peace—a greater, deeper peace than you’ve ever known before. Don’t fight that peace. Don’t tell yourself it’s wrong for you to feel it. Accept it and hold it close. The insanity of your worlds is a product of your lives, your way of life. We offer you a new way of life. That is our treatment.”

Hesitantly, Kemp reached out and took the jewel. “And this is a part of that new way of life?”

The old man nodded. “Another part is a little chapel you will find along the way. Stop there for a moment. Step inside and look at the painting you will find there.”

“Just look at a painting?”

“That’s right. Just look at it.”

“And it will help me?”

“It may.”

The old man stepped down the path. “Peace go with you,” he said and paced slowly down the hill.

Kemp stared at the jewel in his palm, saw the slow wash of color stir within its heart.

“Stage setting,” he told himself, although he didn’t say it quite aloud.

A pastoral scene of enchanting beauty, a man who wore a brown robe and a long white beard, the classic white lines of the building on the plateau, the chapel with a painting. Of course a man would find peace here. How could a man help but find peace here? It was designed and built for the purpose—this scene. Just as an architect would design and an engineer would build a spaceship. Only a spaceship was meant to travel across the void, and this place, this garden, was meant to bring peace to troubled men, men with souls so troubled that they were insane.

Kemp stared at a flowering crab-apple tree that clung to the rocks above him, and even as he watched a slight breeze shook the tree and a shower of petals cascaded down toward him. Dimly, Kemp wondered if that tree kept on blooming over and over again. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it never bore an apple, perhaps it just kept on flowering. For its function here in Sanctuary was to flower, not to fruit. Blossoms had more psychological value as a stage setting than apples—therefore, perhaps, the tree kept on blossoming and blossoming.

Peace, of course. But how could they make it stick? How could the men who ran Sanctuary make peace stay with a man? Did the painting or the Asteroid jewel have something to do with it? And could peace alone provide the answer to the twisted brains that came here?

Doubt jabbed at him with tiny spears, doubt and skepticism—the old skepticism he had brought with him from the dusty old worlds, the frigid old worlds, the bitter old worlds that lay outside the pale of Sanctuary.

And yet doubt, even skepticism, quailed before the beauty of the place, faltered when he remembered the convincing sincerity of the old man in the brown robe, when he remembered those calm blue eyes and the majesty of the long white beard. It was hard to think, Kemp told himself, that all of this could be no more than mere psychological trappings.

He shook his head, bewildered, brushed clinging apple blossoms from his shoulder and resumed his climb, Asteroid jewel still clutched tightly in his hand. The path narrowed until it was scarcely wide enough to walk upon, with the sheer wall on his right knifing up toward the plateau, the precipice to his left dropping abruptly into a little valley where the brook gurgled and laughed beneath the waterfall that loomed just ahead.

At the second turn he came upon the chapel. A little place, it stood close to the path, recessed a little into the wall of rock. The door stood ajar, as if inviting him.

Hesitating for a moment, Kemp stepped into the recess, pushed gently on the door and stepped inside. Stepped inside and halted, frozen by the painting that confronted him. Set in a rocky alcove in the wall, it was lighted by a beam that speared down from the ceiling just above the door.

As if it were a scene one came upon through an open window rather than one caught upon a canvas, the city stood framed within the flare of light—a weird, fantastic city sprawled on some outer world. Bizarre architecture rearing against an outlandish background; towers leaping upward and fading into nothing, showing no clear-cut line where they left off; spidery sky bridges coiling and looping among the spires and domes that somehow were not the way spires and domes should be—the city looked like the impassioned chiselings of some mad sculptor.

And as Kemp stood transfixed before the city in the wall, a bell clanged far above him, one sharp clear note that lanced into his brain and shook him like an angry fist.

Something stirred within his hand, something that came to life and grew and wanted to be free. With a wild exclamation, Kemp jerked his hand in front of him, shaking it to free it of the thing that moved within it—repugnance choking him, an instinctive gesture born in the human race by spiders in dark caves, by crawling things that dropped off jungle leaves and bit.

But it was no spider, no crawling thing. Instead it was a light, a little point of light that slipped from between his fingers and rose and swiftly faded into nothing. And even as it faded, Kemp felt cool fingers on his jumping nerves, fingers that soothed them and quieted them until he felt peace flow toward him once again, but this time a deeper, calmer, vaster peace that took in all the universe, that left him breathless with the very thought of it.