The Thing in the Stone: And Other Stories Read online

  Squatting on the ledge, he noticed that beads of moisture had gathered upon his jacket sleeve — not a result of rain, exactly, but of driven mist. If the temperature should drop a bit the weather might turn nasty.

  He waited, huddled, listening for a sound — a scuffling of feet through leaves, the snap of broken brush — that would betray the presence of someone on the clifftop. But there was no sound at all. The day was muffled. Even the branches of the trees beneath his perch, swaying in the wind, swayed without their usual creaks and groans.

  Fifteen minutes must have passed and there had been no sound from atop the cliff. The wind had increased somewhat and when he twisted his head to one side to try to look up he could feel the soft slash of the driving mist against his cheek.

  He could keep silent no longer in hope of waiting out the jokester. He sensed, in a sudden surge of panic, that time was running out on him.

  'Hey, up there — ' he shouted.

  He waited and there was no response.

  He shouted again, more loudly this time.

  Ordinarily the cliff across the hollow should have bounced back echoes. But now there were no echoes and his shout seemed dampened, as if this wild place had erected some sort of fence to hem him in.

  He shouted again and the misty world took his voice and swallowed it.

  A hissing sound started. Daniels saw it was caused by tiny pellets of ice streaming through the branches of the trees. From one breath to another the driven mist had turned to ice.

  He walked back and forth on the ledge in front of the cave, twenty feet at most, looking for some way of escape. The ledge went out into space and then sheered off. The slanting projection of rock came down from above. He was neatly trapped.

  He moved back into the cave and hunkered down. Here he was protected from the wind and he felt, even through his rising panic, a certain sense of snugness. The cave was not yet cold. But the temperature must be dropping and dropping rather swiftly or the mist would not have turned to ice. He wore a light jacket and could not make a fire. He did not smoke and never carried matches.

  For the first time he faced the real seriousness of his position. It might be days before anyone noticed he was missing. He had few visitors and no one ever paid too much attention to him. Even if someone should find that he was missing and a hunt for him was launched, what were the chances that he would be found? Who would think to look in this hidden cave? How long, he wondered, could a man survive in cold and hunger?

  If he could not get out of here, and soon, what about his livestock? The cows would be heading home from pasture, seeking shelter from the storm, and there would be no one there to let them into the barn. If they were not milked for a day or two they would be tormented by swollen udders. The hogs and chickens would go unfed. A man, he thought, had no right to take the kind of chance he had taken when so many living creatures were dependent on him.

  He crawled farther back into the cave and stretched himself out on his belly, wedging himself into its deepest recess, an ear laid against the stone.

  The creature still was there — of course it still was there. It was trapped even more securely than himself, held down by, perhaps, several hundred feet of solid rock, which had been built up most deliberately through many millions of years.

  It was remembering again. In its mind was another place and, while part of that flow of memory was blurred and wavy, the rest was starkly clear. A great dark plain of rock, one great slab of rock, ran to a far horizon and above that far horizon a reddish sun came up and limned against the great red ball of rising sun was a hinted structure — an irregularity of the horizon that suggested a place. A castle, perhaps, or a city or a great cliff dwelling — it was hard to make out what it was or to be absolutely sure that it was anything at all.

  Home? Was that black expanse of rock the spaceport of the old home planet? Or might it be only a place the creature had visited before it had come to Earth? A place so fantastic, perhaps, that it lingered in the mind.

  Other things mixed into the memory, sensory symbols that might have applied to personalities, life forms, smells, tastes.

  Although he could be wrong, Daniels knew, in supplying this entrapped creature with human sensory perceptions, these human sensory perceptions were the only ones he knew about.

  And now, listening in on the memory of that flat black expanse of rock and imagining the rising sun which outlined the structure of the far horizon, Daniels did something he had never tried to do before. He tried to talk back to the buried creature, tried to let it know that someone was listening and had heard, that it was not as lonely and as isolated as it might have thought it was.

  He did not talk with his tongue — that would have been a senseless thing to do. Sound could never carry through those many feet of stone. He talked with his mind instead.

  Hello, down there, he said. This is a friend of yours. I've been listening to you for a long, long time and I hope that you can hear me. If you can, let us talk together. Let me try to make you understand about myself and the world I live in and you tell me about yourself and the kind of world you lived in and how you came to be where you are and if there is anything I can do for you, any help that I can give.

  He said that much and no more. Having spoken, he continued lying with his ear against the hard cave floor, listening to find out if the creature might have heard him. But the creature apparently had not heard or, having heard, ignored him as something not worth its attention. It went on thinking about the place where the dull red sun was rising above the horizon.

  It had been foolish, and perhaps presumptuous, he knew, for him to have tried to speak to it. He had never tried before; he had simply listened. And he had never tried, either, to speak to those others who talked among the stars — again he'd simply listened.

  What new dimension had been added to himself, he wondered, that would have permitted him to try to communicate with the creature? Had the possibility that he was about to die moved him?

  The creature in the stone might not be subject to death — it might be immortal.

  He crawled out of the far recess of the cave and crept out to where he had room to hunker down.

  The storm had worsened. The ice now was mixed with snow and the temperature had fallen. The ledge in front of the cave was filmed with slippery ice. If a man tried to walk it he'd go plunging down the cliff face to his death.

  The wind was blowing harder. The branches of the trees were waving and a storm of leaves was banking down the hillside, flying with the ice and snow.

  From where he squatted he could see the topmost branches of the clump of birches which grew atop the mound just beyond where the cave tree had stood. And these branches, it seemed to him, were waving about far more violently than could be accounted for by wind. They were lashing wildly from one side to the other and even as he watched they seemed to rise higher in the air, as if the trees, in some great agony, were raising their branches far above their heads in a plea for mercy.

  Daniels crept forward on his hands and knees and thrust his head out to see down to the base of the cliff.

  Not only the topmost branches of the clump of birches were swaying but the entire clump seemed to be in motion, thrashing about as if some unseen hand were attempting to wrench it from the soil. But even as he thought this, he saw that the ground itself was in agitation, heaving up and out. It looked exactly as if someone had taken a time-lapse movie of the development of a frost boil with the film being run at a normal speed. The ground was heaving up and the clump was heaving with it. A shower of gravel and other debris was flowing down the slope, loosened by the heaving of the ground. A boulder broke away and crashed down the hill, crushing brush and shrubs and leaving hideous scars.

  Daniels watched in horrified fascination.

  Was he witnessing, he wondered, some wonderfully speeded-up geological process? He tried to pinpoint exactly what kind of process it might be. He knew of one that seemed to fit. The mound kept on heav
ing upward, splintering outward from its center. A great flood of loose debris was now pouring down the slope, leaving a path of brown in the whiteness of the fallen snow. The clump of birch tipped over and went skidding down the slope and out of the place where it had stood a shape emerged.

  Not a solid shape, but a hazy one that looked as if someone had scraped some stardust from the sky and molded it into a ragged, shifting form that did not set into any definite pattern, that kept shifting and changing, although it did not entirely lose all resemblance to the shape in which it might originally have been molded. It looked as a loose conglomeration of atoms might look if atoms could be seen. It sparkled softly in the grayness of the day and despite its seeming insubstantiality it apparently had some strength — for it continued to push itself from the shattered mound until finally it stood free of it.

  Having freed itself, it drifted up toward the ledge.

  Strangely, Daniels felt no fear, only a vast curiosity. He tried to make out what the drifting shape was but he could not be sure.

  As it reached the ledge and moved slightly above it he drew back to crouch within the cave. The shape drifted in a couple of feet or so and perched on the ledge — either perched upon it or floated just above it.

  You spoke, the sparkling shape said to Daniels.

  It was not a question, nor a statement either, really, and it was not really speaking. It sounded exactly like the talk Daniels had heard when he'd listened to the stars.

  You spoke to it, said the shape, as if you were a friend (although the word was not friend but something else entirely, something warm and friendly). You offered help to it. Is there help that you can give?

  That question at least was clear enough.

  'I don't know,' said Daniels. 'Not right now, there isn't. But in a hundred years from now, perhaps — are you hearing me? Do you know what I am saying?'

  You say there can be help, the creature said, but only after time. Please, what is that time?

  'A hundred years,' said Daniels. 'When the planet goes around the star one hundred times.'

  One hundred? asked the creature.

  Daniels held up the fingers of both hands. 'Can you see my fingers? The appendages on the tips of my arms?'

  See? the creature asked.

  'Sense them. Count them.'

  Yes, I can count them.

  'They number ten,' said Daniels. 'Ten times that many of them would be a hundred.'

  It is no great span of time, the creature said. What kind of help by then?

  'You know genetics? How a creature comes into being, how it knows what kind of thing it is to become, how it grows, how it knows how to grow and what to become. The amino acids that make up the ribonucleic acids and provide the key to the kind of cells it grows and what their functions are.'

  I do not know your terms, the creature said, but I understand. So you know of this? You are not, then, a brute wild creature, like the other life that simply stands and the others that burrow in the ground and climb the standing life forms and run along the ground.

  It did not come out like this, of course. The words were there — or meanings that had the feel of words — but there were pictures as well of trees, of burrowing mice, of squirrels, of rabbits, of the lurching woodchuck and the running fox.

  'Not I,' said Daniels, 'but others of my kind. I know but little of it. There are others who spend all their time in the study of it.'

  The other perched on the ledge and said nothing more. Beyond it the trees whipped in the wind and the snow came whirling down, Daniels huddled back from the ledge, shivered in the cold and wondered if this thing upon the ledge could be hallucination.

  But as he thought it, the thing began to talk again, although this time it did not seem to be talking to him. It talked, rather, as the creature in the stone had talked, remembering. It communicated, perhaps, something he was not meant to know, but Daniels had no way of keeping from knowing. Sentience flowed from the creature and impacted on his mind, filling all his mind, barring all else, so that it seemed as if it were he and not this other who was remembering.

  5

  First there was space — endless, limitless space, so far from everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not so much from fear or loneliness as from the realization that in this eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an insignificance no yardstick could measure. So far from home, so lost, so directionless — and yet not entirely directionless, for there was a trace, a scent, a spoor, a knowing that could not be expressed or understood or even guessed at in the framework of humanity; a trace, a scent, a spoor that showed the way, no matter how dimly or how hopelessly, that something else had taken at some other time. And a mindless determination, an unflagging devotion, a primal urgency that drove him on that faint, dim trail, to follow where it might lead, even to the end of time or space, or the both of them together, never to fail or quit or falter until the trail had finally reached an end or had been wiped out by whatever winds might blow through empty space.

  There was something here. Daniels told himself, that, for all its alienness, still was familiar, a factor that should lend itself to translation into human terms and thus establish some sort of link between this remembering alien mind and his human mind.

  The emptiness and the silence, the cold uncaring went on and on and on and there seemed no end to it. But he came to understand there had to be an end to it and that the end was here, in these tangled hills above the ancient river. And after the almost endless time of darkness and uncaring, another almost endless time of waiting, of having reached the end, of having gone as far as one might go and then settling down to wait with an ageless patience that never would grow weary.

  You spoke of help, the creature said to him. Why help? You do not know this other. Why should you want to help?

  'It is alive,' said Daniels. 'It's alive and I'm alive and is that not enough?'

  I do not know, the creature said.

  'I think it is,' said Daniels.

  And how could you help?

  'I've told you about this business of genetics. I don't know if I can explain — '

  I have the terms from your mind, the creature said. The genetic code.

  'Would this other one, the one beneath the stone, the one you guard — '

  Not guard, the creature said. The one I wait for.

  'You will wait for long.'

  I am equipped for waiting. I have waited long. I can wait much longer.

  'Someday,' Daniels said, 'the stone will erode away. But you need not wait that long. Does this other creature know its genetic code?'

  It knows, the creature said. It knows far more than I.

  'But all of it,' insisted Daniels. 'Down to the last linkage, the final ingredient, the sequences of all the billions of — '

  It knows, the creature said. The first requisite of all life is to understand itself.

  'And it could — it would — be willing to give us that information, to supply us its genetic code?'

  You are presumptuous, said the sparkling creature (although the word was harder than presumptuous). That is information no thing gives another. It is indecent and obscene (here again the words were not exactly indecent and obscene). It involves the giving of one's self into another's hands. It is an ultimate and purposeless surrender.

  'Not surrender,' Daniels said. 'A way of escaping from its imprisonment. In time, in the hundred years of which I told you, the people of my race could take that genetic code and construct another creature exactly like the first. Duplicate it with exact preciseness.'

  But it still would be in stone.

  'Only one of it. The original one. That original could wait for the erosion of the rock. But the other one, its duplicate, could take up life again.'