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

Claws rustled on the floor behind him and a dark form sailed through the air to land upon his shoulder.

“Hannibal!” yelled the startled Kemp.

But, even as he yelled, Hannibal launched himself into the air again, straight from Kemp’s shoulder into empty air, striking viciously at something that was there, something that fought back, but something Kemp could not see at all.

“Hannibal!” Kemp shrieked again, and the shriek was raw and vicious as he realized that his new-found peace had been stripped from him as one might strip a cloak, leaving him naked in the chill of sudden fear.

Hannibal was fighting something, of that there was no doubt. An invisible something that struggled to get free. But Hannibal had a death grip. His savage jaws were closed upon something that had substance, his terrible claws raked at it, tore at it.

Kemp backed away until he felt the stone wall at his back, then stood and stared with unbelieving eyes.

Hannibal was winning out, was dragging the thing in the air down to the ground. As if he were performing slow-motion acrobatics, he twisted and turned in the air, was slowly sinking toward the floor. And never for a moment were those scythelike claws idle. They raked and slashed and tore and the thing that fought them was weakening, dropped faster and faster.

Just before they reached the floor, Hannibal relaxed his grip for a moment, twisted in midair like a cat and pounced again. For a fleeting second Kemp saw the shape of the thing Hannibal held between his jaws, the thing he shook and shook, then cast contemptuously aside—a shimmery, fairy-like thing with dragging wings and a mothlike body. Just a glimpse, that was all.

“Hannibal,” gasped Kemp. “Hannibal, what have you done?”

Hannibal stood on bowed legs and stared back at him with eyes in which Kemp saw the smoky shine of triumph. Like a cat might look when it has caught a bird, like a man might look when he kills a mortal enemy.

“It gave me peace,” said Kemp. “Whatever it was, it gave me peace. And now—”

He took a slow step forward and Hannibal backed away.

But Kemp stopped as a swift thought struck him.

The Asteroid jewel!

Slowly he lifted his two hands and looked at them and found them empty. The jewel, he remembered, had been clutched in his right hand and it had been from that hand that the shining thing arose.

He caught his breath, still staring at his hands.

An Asteroid jewel one moment, and the next, when the bell chimed, a spot of glowing light—then nothing. And yet something, for Hannibal had killed something, a thing that had a moth-like body and still could not have been a moth, for a man can see a moth.

Kemp’s anger at Hannibal faded and in its place came a subtle fear, a fear that swept his brain and left it chisel-sharp and cold with the almost certain knowledge that here he faced an alien threat, a siren threat, a threat that was a lure.

Chambers had told him about a life that could encyst itself, could live in suspended animation; had voiced a fear that the old Martians, who had tried to sweep that life away, had failed.

Could it be that the Asteroid jewels were the encysted life?

Kemp remembered things about the jewels. They never had been analyzed. They were found nowhere else except upon the Asteroids.

The bell might have been the signal for them to awake, a musical note that broke up the encystation, that returned the sleeping entity to its original form.

Entities that were able to give peace. That could cure the twisted brains of men, probably by some subtle change of outlook, by the introduction of some mental factor that man had never known before.

Kemp remembered, with a sudden surge of longing, a stinging sense of loss, the mental peace that had reached out to him—for a fleeting moment felt a deep and sharp regret that it had been taken from him.

But despite that ability to give peace the Martians had feared them, feared them with a deep and devastating fear—a fear so great they had destroyed a planet to rid the System of them. And the Martians were an old race and a wise race.

If the Martians had feared them, there was at least good grounds to suspect Earthmen should fear them, too.

And as he stood there, the horror of the situation seeped into Kemp’s brain. A sanitarium that cured mental cases by the simple process of turning those mental cases over to an alien life which had the power to impose upon the mind its own philosophy, to shape the human mind as it willed it should be shaped. A philosophy that started out with the concept of mental peace and ended—where?

But that was something one couldn’t figure out, Kemp knew—something there was no way to figure out. It could lead anywhere. Especially since one had no way of knowing what sort of mental concepts the aliens of the fifth planet might hold. Concepts that might be good or ill for the human race, but concepts that certainly would not be entirely human.

Clever! So clever that Kemp wondered now why he had not suspected sooner, why he had not smelled a certain rottenness. First the garden to lull one into receptiveness—that odd feeling one had always known this place, making him feel that he was at home so he would put his guard down. Then the painting—meant, undoubtedly, to establish an almost hypnotic state, designed to hold a man transfixed in rapt attention until it was too late to escape the attention of the reawakened life. If, in fact, anyone would have wanted to escape.

That was the insidious part of it—they gave a man what he wanted, what he longed for, something he missed out in the older worlds of struggle and progress. Like a drug—

Claws rattled on the floor.

“Hannibal!” yelled Kemp. But Hannibal didn’t stop.

Kemp plunged toward the door, still calling. “Hannibal! Hannibal, come back here!”

Far up the slope there was a rustle in the bushes. A tiny pebble came tapping down the hill.

“Peace be on you,” said a familiar voice, and Kemp spun around. The old man with the brown robe and the long white whiskers stood in the narrow path.

“Is there anything wrong?” asked the oldster.

“No,” said Kemp. “Not yet. But there’s going to be!”

“I do not—”

“Get out of my way,” snapped Kemp. “I’m going back!”

The blue eyes were as calm as ever, the words as unhurried. “No one ever goes back, son.”

“Gramp,” warned Kemp grimly, “if you don’t step in here so I can go down the path—”

The old man’s hands moved quickly, plunging into the pockets of his robe. Even as Kemp started forward they came out again, tossed something upward and for one breathless instant Kemp saw a dozen or more gleaming Asteroid jewels shimmering in the air, a shower of flashing brilliance.

Bells were clamoring, bells all over the Asteroid, chiming out endlessly that one clear note, time after time, stabbing at Kemp’s brain with the clarity of their tones—turning those sparkling jewels into things that would grasp his mind and give him peace and make him something that wasn’t quite human.

With a bellow of baffled rage, Kemp charged. He saw the old man’s face in front of him, mouth open, those calm eyes now deep pools of hatred, tinged with a touch of fear. Kemp’s fist smacked out, straight into the face, white whiskers and all. The face disappeared and a scream rang out as the oldster toppled off the ledge and plunged toward the rocks below.

Cool fingers touched Kemp’s brain, but he plunged on, almost blindly, down the path. The fingers slipped away and others came and for a moment the peace rolled over him once again. With the last dregs of will power he fought it off, screaming like a tortured man, keeping his legs working like pistons. The wind brought the scent of apple blossoms to him and he wanted to stop beside the brook and take off his shoes and know the feel of soft green grass beneath his feet.