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

But that, one cold corner of his brain told him, was the way they wanted him to feel, the very thing Sanctuary wanted him to do. Staggering, he ran, reeling drunkenly.

He staggered, and as he fell his hand struck something hard and he picked it up. It was a branch, a dead branch fallen from some tree. Grimly, he tested it and found it hard and strong, gripped it in one hand and stumbled down the path.

The club gave him something—some strange psychological advantage—a weapon that he whirled around his head when he screamed at the things that would have seized his mind.

Then there was hard ground beneath his feet—the spaceport. Men ran toward him, yelling at him, and he sprinted forward to meet them, a man that might have been jerked from the caves of Europe half a million years before—a maddened, frothing man with a club in hand, with a savage gleam in his eyes, hair tousled, shirt ripped off.

The club swished and a man slumped to the ground. Another man charged in and the club swished and Harrison Kemp screamed in killing triumph.

The men broke and ran, and Kemp, roaring, chased them down the field.

Somehow he found his ship and spun the lock.

Inside, he shoved the throttle up the rack, forgetting about the niceties of take-off, whipping out into the maw of space with a jerk that almost broke his neck, that gouged deep furrows in the port and crumpled one end of the hangar.

Kemp glanced back just once at the glowing spot that was Sanctuary. After that he kept his face straight ahead. The knotted club still lay beside his chair.

Dr. Daniel Monk ran his finger around the inside of his collar, seemed about to choke.

“But you told me,” he stammered. “You sent for me—”

“Yes,” agreed Spencer Chambers, “I did tell you I had a Martian. But I haven’t got him now. I sent him away.”

Monk stared blankly.

“I had need of him elsewhere,” Chambers explained.

“I don’t understand,” Monk declared weakly. “Perhaps he will be coming back.”

Chambers shook his head. “I had hoped so, but now I am afraid … afraid—”

“But you don’t realize what a Martian would mean to us!” Monk blurted.

“Yes, I do,” declared Chambers. “He could read the manuscripts. Much more easily, much more accurately than they can be translated. That was why I sent for you. That, in fact, was how I knew he was a Martian in the first place. He read some of the photostatic copies of the manuscripts you sent me.”

Monk straightened in his chair. “He read them! You mean you could talk with him!”

Chambers grinned. “Not exactly talk with him, Monk. That is, he didn’t make sounds like you and I do.”

The chairman of the Solar Control Board leaned across the desk.

“Look at me,” he commanded. “Look closely. Can you see anything wrong?”

Monk stammered. “Why, no. Nothing wrong. Those glasses, but a lot of people wear them.”

“I know,” said Chambers. “A lot of people wear them for effect. Because they think it’s smart. But I don’t. I wear mine to hide my eyes.”

“Your eyes!” whispered Monk. “You mean there’s something—”

“I’m blind,” said Chambers. “Very few people know it. I’ve kept it a careful secret. I haven’t wanted the world’s pity. I don’t want the knowledge I can’t see hampering my work. People wouldn’t trust me.”

Monk started to speak, but his words dribbled into silence.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” snapped Chambers. “That’s the very thing I’ve been afraid of. That’s why no one knows. I wouldn’t have told you except I had to tell to explain about Hannibal.”

“Hannibal?”

“Hannibal,” said Chambers, “is the Martian. People thought he was my pet. Something I carried around with me because of vanity. Because I wanted something different. Something to catch the headlines. But he was more than a pet. He was a Seeing-eye dog. He was my eyes. With Hannibal around I could see. Better than I could see with my own eyes. Much better.”

Monk started forward, then settled back. “You mean Hannibal was telepathic?”

Chambers nodded. “Naturally telepathic. Perhaps it was the way the Martians talked. The only way they could talk. He telepathed perfect visual images of everything he saw and in my mind I could see as clearly, as perfectly as if I had seen with my own eyes. Better even, for Hannibal had powers of sight a human does not have.”

Monk tapped his fingers on the chair arm, staring out of the window at the pines that marched along the hill.

“Hannibal was found out in the Asteroids, wasn’t he?” Monk asked suddenly.

“He was,” said Chambers. “Until a few days ago I didn’t know what he was. No one knew what he was. He was just a thing that saw for me. I tried to talk with him and couldn’t. There seemed no way in which to establish a communication of ideas. Almost as if he didn’t know there were such things as ideas. He read the newspapers for me. That is, he looked at the page, and in my mind I saw the page and read it. But I was the one that had to do the reading. All Hannibal did was telepath the picture of the paper to me and my mind would do the work. But when I picked up the manuscript photostats it was Hannibal who read. To me they meant nothing—just funny marks. But Hannibal knew. He read them to me. He made me see the things they said. I knew then he was a Martian. No one else but a Martian, or Dr. Monk, could read that stuff.”

He matched his fingers carefully. “I’ve wondered how, since he was a Martian, he got into the Belt. How he could have managed to survive. When we first found him there was no reason to suspect he was a Martian. After all, we didn’t know what a Martian was. They left no description of themselves. No paintings, no sculptures.”

“The Martians,” said Monk, “didn’t run to art. They were practical, deadly serious, a race without emotion.”

He drummed his fingers along the chair arm again. “There’s just one thing. Hannibal was your eyes. You needed him. In such a case I can’t imagine why you would have parted with him.”

“I needed to see,” said Chambers, “in a place I couldn’t go.”

“You … you. What was that?”

“Exactly what I said. There was a place I had to see. A place I had to know about. For various reasons it was closed to me. I could not, dare not, go there. So I sent Hannibal. I sent my eyes there for me.”

“And you saw?”

“I did.”

“You mean you could send him far away—”

“I sent him to the Asteroids,” said Chambers. “To be precise, to Sanctuary. Millions of miles. And I saw what he saw. Still see what he sees, in fact. I can’t see you because I’m blind. But I see what’s happening on Sanctuary this very moment. Distance has no relation to telepathy. Even the first human experiments in it demonstrated that.”

The phone on Chambers’ desk buzzed softly. He groped for the receiver, finally found it, lifted it. “Hello,” he said.

“This is Moses Allen,” said the voice on the other end. “Reports are just starting to come in. My men are rounding up the Asteroid jewels. Got bushels of them so far. Putting them under locks you’d have to use atomics to get open.”

Worry edged Chambers’ voice. “You made sure there was no slip. No way anyone could get wind of what we’re doing and hide out some of them.”

Allen chuckled. “I got thousands of men on the job. All of them hit at the same minute. First we checked records of all sales. To be sure we knew just who had them and how many. We haven’t got a few of them yet, but we know who’s got them. Some of the owners are a little stubborn, but we’ll sweat it out of them. We know they’ve got them cached away somewhere.”