The Thing in the Stone

by Clifford Donald Simak

  And standing there he wondered once again, as he had many times before, what strange mechanism operated to shift him bodily in space so that when he was transported to a time other than his own he did not find himself buried under, say, twenty feet of rock or soil or suspended twenty feet above the surface.

  But now, he knew, was no time to think or wonder. By a strange quirk of circumstance he was no longer in the cave and it made good sense to get away from where he was as swiftly as he could. For if he stayed standing where he was he might snap back unexpectedly to his present and find himself still huddled in the cave.

  He turned clumsily about, his feet tangling in the muddy bottom, and lunged towards the shore. The going was hard but he made it and went up the slimy stretch of muddy beach until he could reach the tumbled rocks and could sit and rest.

  His breathing was difficult. He gulped great lungfuls and the air had a strange taste to it, not like normal air.

  He sat on the rock, gasping for breath, and gazed out across the sheet of water shining in the high, warm sun. Far out he caught sight of a long, humping swell and watched it coming in. When it reached the shore it washed up the muddy incline almost to his feet. Far out on the glassy surface another swell was forming.

  The sheet of water was greater, he realized, than he had first imagined. This was also the first time in his wanderings through the past that he had ever come upon any large body of water. Always before he had emerged on dry land whose general contours had been recognizable—and there had always been the river flowing through the hills.

  Here nothing was recognizable. This was a totally different place and there could be no question that he had been projected farther back in time than ever before—back to the day of some great epicontinental sea, back to a time, perhaps, when the atmosphere had far less oxygen than it would have in later eons. More than likely, he thought, he was very close in time to that boundary line where life for a creature such as he would be impossible. Here there apparently was sufficient oxygen, although a man must pump more air into his lungs than he would normally. Go back a few million years and the oxygen might fall to the point where it would be insufficient. Go a little farther back and find no free oxygen at all.

  Watching the beach, he saw the little things skittering back and forth, seeking refuge in spume-whitened piles of drift or popping into tiny burrows. He put his hand down on the rock on which he sat and scrubbed gently at a patch of green. It slid off the rock and clung to his flesh, smearing his palm with a slimy gelatinous mess that felt disgusting and unclean.

  Here, then, was the first of life to dwell upon the land—scarcely creatures as yet, still clinging to the edge of water, afraid and unequipped to wander too far from the side of that wet and gentle mother which, from the first beginning, had nurtured life. Even the plants still clung close to the sea, existing, perhaps, only upon rocky surfaces so close to the beach that occasional spray could reach them.

  Daniels found that now he did not have to gasp quite so much for breath. Plowing through the mud up to the rock had been exhausting work in an oxygen-poor atmosphere. But sitting quietly on the rocks, he could get along all right.

  Now that the blood had stopped pounding in his head he became aware of silence. He heard one sound only, the soft lapping of the water against the muddy beach, a lonely effect that seemed to emphasize rather than break the silence.

  Never before in his life, he realized, had he heard so little sound. Back in the other worlds he had known there had been not one noise, but many, even on the quietest days. But here there was nothing to make a sound—no trees, no animals, no insects, no birds—just the water running to the far horizon and the bright sun in the sky.

  For the first time in many months he knew again that sense of out-of-placeness, of not belonging, the feeling of being where he was not wanted and had no right to be, an intruder in a world that was out of bounds, not for him alone but for anything that was more complex or more sophisticated than the little skitterers on the beach.

  He sat beneath the alien sun, surrounded by the alien water, watching the little things that in eons yet to come would give rise to such creatures as himself, and tried to feel some sort of kinship to the skitterers. But he could feel no kinship.

  And suddenly in this place of one-sound-only there came a throbbing, faint but clear and presently louder, pressing down against the water, beating at the little island—a sound out of the sky.

  Daniels leaped to his feet and looked up and the ship was there, plummeting down toward him. But not a ship of solid form, it seemed—rather a distorted thing, as if many planes of light (if there could be such things as planes of light) had been slapped together in a haphazard sort of way.

  A throbbing came from it that set the atmosphere to howling and the planes of light kept changing shape or changing places, so that the ship, from one moment to the next, never looked the same.

  It had been dropping fast to start with but now it was slowing down as it continued to fall, ponderously and with massive deliberation, straight toward the island.

  Daniels found himself crouching, unable to jerk his eyes and senses away from this mass of light and thunder that came out of the sky.

  The sea and mud and rock, even in the full light of the sun, were flickering with the flashing that came from the shifting of the planes of light. Watching it through eyes squinted against the flashes, Daniels saw that if the ship were to drop to the surface it would not drop upon the island, as he first had feared, but a hundred feet or so offshore.

  Not more than fifty feet above the water the great ship stopped and hovered and a bright thing came from it. The object hit the water with a splash but did not go under, coming to rest upon the shallow, muddy bottom of the sea, with a bit less than half of it above the surface. It was a sphere, a bright and shiny globe against which the water lapped, and even with the thunder of the ship beating at his ears, Daniels imagined he could hear the water lapping at the sphere.

  Then a voice spoke above this empty world, above the throbbing of the ship, the imagined lapping sound of water, a sad, judicial voice—although it could not have been a voice, for any voice would have been too puny to be heard. But the words were there and there was no doubt of what they said:

  Thus, according to the verdict and the sentence, you are here deported and abandoned upon this barren planet, where it is most devoutly hoped you will find the time and opportunity to contemplate your sins and especially the sin of (and here were words and concepts Daniels could not understand, hearing them only as a blur of sound—but the sound of them, or something in the sound of them, was such as to turn his blood to ice and at the same time fill him with a disgust and a loathing such as he’d never known before). It is regrettable, perhaps, that you are immune to death, for much as we might detest ourselves for doing it, it would be a kinder course to discontinue you and would serve better than this course to exact our purpose, which is to place you beyond all possibility of ever having contact with any sort of life again.. Here, beyond the farthest track of galactic intercourse, on this uncharted planet, we can only hope that our purpose will be served. And we urge upon you such self-examination that if, by some remote chance, in some unguessed time, you should be freed through ignorance or malice, you shall find it within yourself so to conduct your existence as not to meet or merit such fate again. And now, according to our law, you may speak any final words you wish.

  The voice ceased and after a while came another. And while the terminology was somewhat more involved than Daniels could grasp their idiom translated easily into human terms.

  Go screw yourself, it said.

  The throbbing deepened and the ship began to move straight up into the sky. Daniels watched it until the thunder died and the ship itself was a fading twinkle in the blue.

  He rose from his crouch and stood erect, trembling and weak. Groping behind him for the rock, he found it and sat down again.

  Once again the only sound was the lapp
ing of the water on the shore. He could not hear, as he had imagined that he could, the water against the shining sphere that lay a hundred feet offshore. The sun blazed down out of the sky and glinted on the sphere and Daniels found that once again he was gasping for his breath.

  Without a doubt, out there in the shallow water, on the mudbank that sloped up to the island, lay the creature in the stone. And how then had it been possible for him to be transported across the hundreds of millions of years to this one microsecond of time that held the answer to all the questions he had asked about the intelligence beneath the limestone? It could not have been sheer coincidence, for this was coincidence of too large an order ever to come about. Had he somehow, subconsciously, gained more knowledge than he had been aware of from the twinkling creature that had perched upon the ledge? For a moment, he remembered, their minds had met and mingled—at that moment had there occurred a transmission of knowledge, unrecognized, buried in some corner of himself? Or was he witnessing the operation of some sort of psychic warning system set up to scare off any future intelligence that might be tempted to liberate this abandoned and marooned being? And what about the twinkling creature? Could some hidden, unguessed good exist in the thing imprisoned in the sphere—for it to have commanded the loyalty and devotion of the creature on the ledge beyond the slow erosion of geologic ages? The question raised another: What were good and evil? Who was there to judge?

  The evidence of the twinkling creature was, of course, no evidence at all. No human being was so utterly depraved that he could not hope to find a dog to follow him and guard him even to the death.

  More to wonder at was what had happened within his own jumbled brain that could send him so unerringly to the moment of a vital happening. What more would he find in it to astonish and confound him? How far along the path to ultimate understanding might it drive him? And what was the purpose of that driving?

  He sat on the rock and gasped for breath. The sea lay flat and calm beneath the blazing sun, its only motion the long swells running in to break around the sphere and on the beach. The little skittering creatures ran along the mud and he rubbed his palm against his trouser leg, trying to brush off the green and slimy scum.

  He could wade out, he thought, and have a closer look at the sphere lying in the mud. But it would be a long walk in such an atmosphere and he could not chance it—for he must be nowhere near the cave up in that distant future when he popped back to his present.

  Once the excitement of knowing where he was, the sense of out-of-placeness, had worn off, this tiny mud-flat island was a boring place. There was nothing but the sky and sea and the muddy beach; there was nothing much to look at. It was a place, he thought, where nothing ever happened, or was about to happen once the ship had gone away and the great event had ended. Much was going on, of course, that in future ages would spell out to quite a lot—but it was mostly happening out of sight, down at the bottom of this shallow sea. The skittering things, he thought, and the slimy growth upon the rock were hardy, mindless pioneers of this distant day—awesome to look upon and think about but actually not too interesting.

  He began drawing aimless patterns in the mud with the toe of one boot. He tried to make a tic-tac-toe layout but so much mud was clinging to his toe that it didn’t quite come out.

  And then, instead of drawing in the mud, he was scraping with his toe in fallen leaves, stiff with frozen sleet and snow.

  The sun was gone and the scene was dark except for a glow from something in the woods just down the hill from him. Driving sheets of snow swirled into his face and he shivered. He pulled his jacket close about him and began to button it. A man, he thought, could catch his death of cold this way, shifting as quickly as he had shifted from a steaming mudbank to the whiplash chill of a northern blizzard.

  The yellow glow still persisted on the slope below him and he could hear the sound of human voices. What was going on? He was fairly certain of where he was, a hundred feet or so above the place where the cliff began—there should be no one down there; there should not be a light.

  He took a slow step down the hill, then hesitated. He ought not to be going down the hill—he should be heading straight for home. The cattle would be waiting at the barnyard gate, hunched against the storm, their coats covered with ice and snow, yearning for the warmth and shelter of the barn. The pigs would not have been fed, nor the chickens either. A man owed some consideration to his livestock.

  But someone was down there, someone with a lantern, almost on the lip of the cliff. If the damn fools didn’t watch out, they could slip and go plunging down into a hundred feet of space. Coon hunters more than likely, although this was not the kind of night to be out hunting coon. The coons would all be denned up.

  But whoever they might be, he should go down and warn them.

  He was halfway to the lantern, which appeared to be setting on the ground, when someone picked it up and held it high and Daniels saw and recognized the face of the man who held it.

  Daniels hurried forward.

  “Sheriff, what are you doing here?”

  But he had the shamed feeling that he knew, that he should have known from the moment he had seen the light.

  “Who is there?” the sheriff asked, wheeling swiftly and tilting the lantern so that its rays were thrown in Daniels’ direction. “Daniels,” he gasped. “Good God, man, where have you been?”

  “Just walking around,” said Daniels weakly. The answer, he knew, was no good at all—but how could he tell anyone that he had just returned from a trip through time?

  “Damn it,” the sheriff said, disgusted. “We’ve been hunting you. Ben Adams got scared when he dropped over to your place and you weren’t there. He knows how you go walking around in the woods and he was afraid something had happened to you. So he phoned me, and he and his boys began looking for you. We were afraid you had fallen or had been hurt somehow. A man wouldn’t last the night in a storm like this.”

  “Where is Ben now?” asked Daniels.

  The sheriff gestured down the hill and Daniels saw that two men, probably Adams’ sons, had a rope snubbed around a tree and that the rope extended down over the cliff.

  “He’s down on the rope,” the sheriff said. “Having a look in the cave. He felt somehow you might be in the cave.”

  “He had good reason to—” Daniels started to say but he had barely begun to speak when the night was rent by a shriek of terror. The shrieking did not stop. It kept on and on. The sheriff thrust the lantern at Daniels and hurried forward.

  No guts, Daniels thought. A man who could be vicious enough to set up another for death, to trap him in a cave—but who, when the chips were down, could not go through with it and had to phone the sheriff to provide a witness to his good intentions—a man like that lacked guts.

  The shrieks had fallen to moaning. The sheriff hauled on the rope, helped by one of Adams’ sons. A man’s head and shoulders appeared above the cliff top and the sheriff reached out and hauled him to safety.

  Ben Adams collapsed on the ground and never stopped his moaning. The sheriff jerked him to his feet.

  “What’s the matter, Ben?”

  “There’s something down there,” Adams screamed. “There is something in the cave—”

  “Something, damn it? What would it be? A cat? A panther?”

  “I never seen it. I just knew that it was there. I felt it. It was crouched back inside the cave.”

  “How could anything be in there? Someone cut down the tree. How could anything get into the cave?”

  “I don’t know,” howled Adams. “It might have been in there when the tree was cut. It might have been trapped in there.”

  One of the sons was holding Ben erect and the sheriff moved away. The other son was puffing in the rope and neatly coiling it.

  “Another thing,” the sheriff said, “how come you thought Daniels might be in that cave? If the tree was cut down he couldn’t have used a rope the way you did, for there wasn’t any rope
. If he had used a rope it would still have been there. I don’t know what’s going on—damned if I do. You down messing in that cave and Daniels comes walking out of the woods. I wish someone would tell me.”

  Adams, who had been hobbling forward, saw Daniels for the first time and came to a sudden halt.

  “Where did you come from?” he demanded. “Here we been wearing out our guts trying to hunt you down and then—”

  “Oh, go on home,” the sheriff said in a disgusted tone of voice. “There’s a fishy smell to this. It’s going to take me a little while to get it figured out.”

  Daniels reached out his hand to the son who had finished coiling the rope.

  “I believe that’s my rope,” he said.

  Without protest, taken by surprise, the boy handed it to him.

  “We’ll cut across the woods,” said Ben. “Home’s closer that way.”

  “Good night, men,” the sheriff said.

  Slowly the sheriff and Daniels climbed the hill.

  “Daniels,” said the sheriff, “you were never out walking in this storm. If you had been you’d have had a whole lot more snow on you than shows. You look like you just stepped from a house.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t exactly walking around,” Daniels said.

  “Would you mind telling me where you were? I don’t mind doing my duty as I see it but I don’t relish being made to look a fool while I’m doing it.”

  “Sheriff, I can’t tell you. I’m sorry. I simply cannot tell you.”

  “All right, then. What about the rope?”

  “It’s my rope,” said Daniels. “I lost it this afternoon.”

  “And I suppose you can’t tell me about that, either.”

  “No, I guess I can’t.”

  “You know,” the sheriff said, “I’ve had a lot of trouble with Ben Adams through the years. I’d hate to think I was going to have trouble with you, too.”

  They climbed the hill and walked up to the house. The sheriff’s car was parked out on the road.