The Thing in the Stone: And Other Stories Read online

  He had walked into the paleontologist's office and it had taken him a moment fully to see the man seated toward the back of the room at a cluttered desk. The entire place was cluttered. There were long tables covered with chunks of rock with embedded fossils, Scattered here and there were stacks of papers. The room was large and badly lighted. It was a dingy and depressing place.

  'Doctor?' Daniels had asked. 'Are you Dr. Thorne?'

  The man rose and deposited a pipe in a cluttered ashtray. He was big, burly, with graying hair that had a wild look to it. His face was seamed and weather-beaten. When he moved he shuffled like a bear.

  'You must be Daniels,' he said. 'Yes, I see you must be. I had you on my calendar for three o'clock. So glad you could come,"

  His great paw engulfed Daniel's hand. He pointed to a chair beside the desk, sat down and retrieved his pipe from the overflowing tray, began packing it from a large canister that stood on the desk.

  'Your letter said you wanted to see me about something important,' he said. 'But then that's what they all say. But there must have been something about your letter — an urgency, a sincerity. I haven't the time, you understand, to see everyone who writes. All of them have found something, you see. What is it, Mr. Daniels, that you have found?'

  Daniels said, 'Doctor, I don't quite know how to start what I have to say. Perhaps it would be best to tell you first that something had happened to my brain.'

  Thorne was lighting his pipe. He talked around the stem. 'In such a case, perhaps I am not the man you should be talking to. There are other people — '

  'No, that's not what I mean,' said Daniels. 'I'm not seeking help. I am quite all right physically and mentally, too. About five years ago I was in a highway accident. My wife and daughter were killed and I was badly hurt and — '

  'I am sorry, Mr. Daniels.'

  'Thank you — but that is all in the past. It was rough for a time but I muddled through it. That's not what I'm here for. I told you I was badly hurt — '

  'Brain damage?'

  'Only minor. Or so far as the medical findings are concerned. Very minor damage that seemed to clear up rather soon. The bad part was the crushed chest and punctured lung.'

  'But you're all right now?'

  'As good as new,' said Daniels. 'But since the accident my brain's been different. As if I had new senses. I see things, understand things that seem impossible.'

  'You mean you have hallucinations?'

  'Not hallucinations. I am sure of that. I can see the past.'

  'How do you mean — see the past?'

  'Let me try to tell you,' Daniels said. 'exactly how it started. Several years ago I bought an abandoned farm in south-western Wisconsin. A place to hole up in, a place to hide away. With my wife and daughter gone I still was recoiling from the world. I had got through the first brutal shock but I needed a place where I could lick my wounds. If this sounds like self-pity — I don't mean it that way. I am trying to be objective about why I acted as I did, why I bought the farm.'

  'Yes. I understand,' said Thorne. 'But I'm not entirely sure hiding was the wisest thing to do.'

  'Perhaps not, but it seemed to me the answer. It has worked out rather well. I fell in love with the country. That part of Wisconsin is ancient land. It has stood uncovered by the sea for four hundred million years. For some reason it was not overridden by the Pleistocene glaciers. It has changed, of course, but only as the result of weathering. There have been no great geologic upheavals, no massive erosions — nothing to disturb it.'

  'Mr. Daniels,' said Thorne, somewhat testily, 'I don't quite see what this has to do — '

  'I'm sorry. I am just trying to lay the background for what I came to tell you. It came on rather slowly at first and I thought that I was crazy, that I was seeing things, that there had been more brain damage than had been apparent — or that I was finally cracking up. I did a lot of walking in the hills, you see. The country is wild and rugged and beautiful — a good place to be out in. The walking made me tired and I could sleep at night. But at times the hills changed. Only a little at first. Later on they changed more and finally they became places I had never seen before, that no one had ever seen before.'

  Thorne scowled. 'You are trying to tell me they changed into the past.'

  Daniels nodded. 'Strange vegetation, funny-looking trees. In the earlier times, of course, no grass at all. Underbrush of ferns and scouring rushes. Strange animals, strange things in the sky. Saber-tooth cats and mastodons, pterosaurs and uintatheres and — '

  'All at the same time?' Thorne asked, interrupting. 'All mixed up?'

  'Not at all. The time periods I see seem to be true time periods. Nothing out of place. I didn't know at first — but when I was able to convince myself that I was not hallucinating I sent away for books. I studied. I'll never be an expert, of course — never a geologist or paleontologist — but I learned enough to distinguish one period from another, to have some idea of what I was looking at.'

  Thorne took his pipe out of his mouth and perched it in the ashtray. He ran a massive hand through his wild hair.

  'It's unbelievable,' he said. 'It simply couldn't happen. You said all this business came on rather slowly?'

  'To begin with it was hazy, the past foggily imposed upon the present, then the present would slowly fade and the past came in, real and solid. But it's different now. Once in a while there's a bit of flickering as the present gives way to the past — but mostly it simply changes, as if at the snap of a finger. The present goes away and I'm standing in the past. The past is all around me. Nothing of the present is left.'

  'But you aren't really in the past? Physically, I mean.'

  'There are times when I'm not in it at all. I stand in the present and the distant hills or the river valley changes. But ordinarily it changes all around me, although the funny thing about it is that, as you say, I'm not really in it. I can see it and it seems real enough for me to walk around in it. I can walk over to a tree and put my hand out to feel it and the tree is there, But I seem to make no impact on the past. It's as if I were not there at all. The animals do not see me. I've walked up to within a few feet of dinosaurs. They can't see me or hear or smell me. If they had I'd have been dead a dozen times. It's as if I were walking through a three-dimensional movie. At first I worried a lot about the surface differences that might exist. I'd wake up dreaming of going into the past and being buried up to my waist in a rise of ground that since has eroded away. But it doesn't work that way. I'm walking along in the present and then I'm walking in the past. It's as if a door were there and I stepped through it. I told you I don't really seem to be in the past — but I'm not in the present, either. I tried to get some proof. I took a camera with me and shot a lot of pictures. When the films were developed there was nothing on them. Not the past — but what is more important, not the present, either. If I had been hallucinating, the camera should have caught pictures of the present. But apparently there was nothing there for the camera to take. I thought maybe the camera failed or I had the wrong kind of film. So I tried several cameras and different types of film and nothing happened. I got no pictures. I tried bringing something back. I picked flowers, after there were flowers. I had no trouble picking them but when I came back to the present I was empty-handed. I tried to bring back other things as well. I thought maybe it was only live things, like flowers, that I couldn't bring, so I tried inorganic things — like rocks — but I never was able to bring anything back.'

  'How about a sketch pad?'

  'I thought of that but I never used one. I'm no good at sketching — besides, I figured, what was the use? The pad would come back blank.'

  'But you never tried.'

  'No,' said Daniels. 'I never tried. Occasionally I do make sketches after I get back to the present. Not every time but sometimes. From memory. But, as I said, I'm not very good at sketching.'

  'I don't know,' said Thorne. 'I don't really know. This all sounds incredible. But if there should be
something to it — Tell me, were you ever frightened? You seem quite calm and matter-of-fact about it now, but at first you must have been frightened.'

  'At first,' said Daniels, 'I was petrified. Not only was I scared, physically scared — frightened for my safety, frightened that I'd fallen into a place from which I never could escape — but also afraid that I'd gone insane. And there was the loneliness.'

  'What do you mean — loneliness?'

  'Maybe that's not the right word. Out of place. I was where I had no right to be. Lost in a place where man had not as yet appeared and would not appear for millions of years. In a world so utterly alien that I wanted to hunker down and shiver. But I, not the place, was really the alien there. I still get some of that feeling every now and then. I know about it, of course, and am braced against it, but at times it still gets to me. I'm a stranger to the air and the light of that other time — it's all imagination, of course.'

  'Not necessarily,' said Thorne.

  'But the greatest fear is gone now, entirely gone. The fear I was insane. I am convinced now.'

  'How are you convinced? How could a man be convinced?'

  'The animals. The creatures I see — '

  'You mean you recognize them from the illustrations in these books you have been reading.'

  'No, not that. Not entirely that. Of course the pictures helped. But actually it's the other way around. Not the likeness, but the differences. You see, none of the creatures are exactly like the pictures in the books. Some of them not at all like them. Not like the reconstruction the paleontologists put together. If they had been I might still have thought they were hallucinations, that what I was seeing was influenced by what I'd seen or read. I could have been feeding my imagination on prior knowledge. But since that was not the case, it seemed logical to assume that what I see is real. How could I imagine that Tyrannosaurus had dewlaps all the colors of the rainbow? How could I imagine that some of the saber-tooths had tassels on their ears? How could anyone possibly imagine that the big thunder beasts of the Eocene had hides as colorful as giraffes?'

  'Mr. Daniels,' said Thorne, 'I have great reservations about all that you have told me, Every fiber of my training rebels against it. I have a feeling that I should waste no time on it. Undoubtedly, you believe what you have told me. You have the look of an honest man about you. Have you talked to any other men about this? Any other paleontologists or geologists? Perhaps a neuropsychiatrist?'

  'No,' said Daniels. 'You're the only person, the only man I have talked with. And I haven't told you all of it. This is really all just background.'

  'My God, man — just background?'

  'Yes, just background. You see, I also listen to the stars.' Thorne got up from his chair, began shuffling together a stack of papers. He retrieved the dead pipe from the ashtray and stuck it in his mouth.

  His voice, when he spoke, was noncommittal.

  'Thank you for coming in,' he said. 'It's been most interesting.'

  3

  And that was where he had made his mistake. Daniels told himself. He never should have mentioned listening to the stars. His interview had gone well until he had. Thorne had not believed him, of course, but he had been intrigued, would have listened further, might even have pursued the matter, although undoubtedly secretly and very cautiously.

  At fault, Daniels knew, had been his obsession with the creature in the stone. The past was nothing — it was the creature in the stone that was important and to tell of it, to explain it and how he knew that it was there, he must tell about his listening to the stars.

  He should have known better, he told himself. He should have held his tongue. But here had been a man who, while doubting, still had been willing to listen without laughter, and in his thankfulness Daniels had spoken too much.

  The wick of the oil lamp set upon the kitchen table guttered in the air currents that came in around the edges of the ill-fitting windows. A wind had risen after chores were done and now shook the house with gale-like blasts. On the far side of the room the fire in the wood-burning stove threw friendly, wavering flares of light across the floor and the stovepipe, in response to the wind that swept the chimney top, made gurgling, sucking sounds.

  Thorne had mentioned a neuropsychiatrist, Daniels remembered, and perhaps that was the kind of man he should have gone to see. Perhaps before he attempted to interest anyone in what he could see or hear, he should make an effort to find out why and how he could hear and see these things. A man who studied the working of the brain and mind might come up with new answers — if answers were to be had.

  Had that blow upon his head so rearranged, so shifted some process in his brain that he had gained new capabilities? Was it possible that his brain had been so jarred, so disarranged as to bring into play certain latent talents that possibly, in millennia to come, might have developed naturally by evolutionary means? Had the brain damage short-circuited evolution and given him — and him alone — these capabilities, these senses, perhaps a million years ahead of time?

  It seemed — well, not reasonable but one possible explanation. Still, a trained man might have some other explanation.

  He pushed his chair back from the table and walked over to the stove. He used the lifter to raise the lid of the rickety old cook stove. The wood in the firebox had burned down to embers. Stooping, he picked up a stick of wood from the woodbox and fitted it in, added another smaller one and replaced the lid. One of these days soon, he told himself, he would have to get the furnace in shape for operation.

  He went out to stand on the porch, looking toward the river hills. The wind whooped out of the north, whistling around the corners of the building and booming in the deep hollows that ran down to the river, but the sky was clear — steely clear, wiped fresh by the wind and sprinkled with stars, their light shivering in the raging atmosphere.

  Looking up at the stars, he wondered what they might be saying but he didn't try to listen. It took a lot of effort and concentration to listen to the stars. He had first listened to them on a night like this, standing out here on the porch and wondering what they might be saying, wondering if the stars did talk among themselves. A foolish, vagrant thought, a wild, daydreaming sort of notion, but, voicing it, he had tried to listen, knowing even as he did that it was foolishness but glorying in his foolishness, telling himself how fortunate he was that he could afford to be so inane as to try to listen to the stars — as a child might believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Rabbit. He'd listened and he'd heard and while he'd been astonished, there could be no doubt about it, no doubt at all that out there somewhere other beings were talking back and forth. He might have been listening in on a party line, he thought, but a party line that carried millions, perhaps billions, of long-distance conversations. Not words, of course, but something (thought, perhaps) that was as plain as words. Not all of it understandable — much of it, as a matter of fact, not understandable — possibly because his background and his learning gave him no basis for an understanding. He compared himself to an Australian aborigine listening to the conversation of a couple of nuclear physicists discussing a new theory.

  Shortly after that, when he bad been exploring the shallow cave down on Cat Den Point, he had picked up his first indication of the creature buried in the stone. Perhaps, he thought, if he'd not listened to the stars, if he'd not known he could listen to the stars, if he'd not trained his mind by listening, he would not have heard the creature buried deep beneath the limestone.

  He stood looking at the stars and listening to the wind and, far across the river, on a road that wound over the distant hills, he caught the faint glimmer of headlights as a car made its way through the night. The wind let up for a moment, as if gathering its strength to blow even harder and, in the tiny lull that existed before the wind took up again, he heard another sound — the sound of an axe hitting wood, He listened carefully and the sound came again but so tossed about by the wind that he could not be sure of its direction.

  He must
be mistaken, he thought. No one would be out and chopping on a night like this. Coon hunters might be the answer. Coon hunters at times chopped down a tree to dislodge a prey too well hidden to be spotted. The unsportsmanlike trick was one that Ben Adams and his overgrown, gangling sons might engage in. But this was no night for coon hunting. The wind would blow away scent and the dogs would be unable to track. Quiet nights were the best for hunting coon. And no one would be insane enough to cut down a tree on a night like this when a swirling wind might catch it and topple it back upon the cutters.