Cemetery World (7 page)

She stopped talking and looked hard at me. I said nothing. In her own time, she’d get around to it. Maybe she had a reason for telling it like this. Maybe she had to live it all over again, to re-examine it all again, to be certain (once again? How many times again?) that she had not erred in judgement, that what she had done was right. I was not about to hurry her, although, God knows, I was a bit impatient.

“There wasn’t much,” she said. “A series of letters that shed a little light on the first human colonization of Alden—nothing startling, nothing new, but they gave one the feeling of the times. A small sheaf of rather amateurish poems written by a girl in her teens or early twenties. Invoices from a small business firm that might have been of some slight interest to an economic historian, and a memorandum written in rather ponderous language by an old man setting down a story that he had been told by his grandfather, who had been one of the original settlers from Earth.”

“And the memorandum?”

“It told a strange story,” she said. “I took it to Professor Thorndyke and told him what I’ve just told you and asked him to read the memo and after he had read it he sat there for a time, not looking at me or the memo or anything at all and then said a word I’d never heard before—Anachron.”

“What is Anachron?” asked Elmer.

“It’s a mythical planet,” I said, “a sort of never-never land. Something the archaeologists dreamed up, a place they theorize …”

“A coined word,” said Cynthia. “I didn’t ask Dr. Thorndyke, but I suspect it comes from anachronism—something out of place in time, very much out of place. You see, for years the archaeologists have been finding evidence of an unknown race that left their inscriptions on a number of other planets, perhaps on many more other planets than they know, for their fragmentary inscriptions have been found only in association with the native artifacts …”

“As if they were visitors,” I said, “who had left behind a trinket or two. They could have visited many planets and their trinkets would be found only on a few of them, by sheer chance.”

“You said there was a memo?” Elmer asked. 

“I have it here,” said Cynthia. She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and brought out a long billfold. From it she took a sheaf of folded paper. “Not the original,” she said. “A copy. The original was old and fragile. It would not take much handling.”

She handed the papers to Elmer and he unfolded them, took a quick look at them, and handed them to me. “I’ll poke up the fire,” he said, “so there will be light. You read it aloud so we all can hear it.”

The memo was written in a crabbed hand, the hand, most likely, of an old and feeble man. In places the writing was a little blurred, but was fairly. legible. There was a number at the top of the first page—2305.

Cynthia was watching me. “The year date,” she said. “That is what I took it for and Professor Thorndyke thought the same. It would be about right if the man who wrote it is who I think he was.”

Elmer had poked up the fire, pushing the wood and coals together, and the light was good. Elmer said, “All right, Fletch. Why don’t you begin?” So I began:

Chapter 6

2305 … To my grandson, Howard Lansing: My grandfather, when I was a young man, told me of an event which he experienced when he was a young man of about my age and now that I am as old as he was when he told me of it, or older, I pass it on to you, but because you are still a youngster, I am writing it down so that when you have grown older you may read it and understand it and the implications of it the better.

At the time he related the happening to me he was of sound mind, with no mental and only those physical infirmities which steal upon a man as the years go by. And strange as the tale may be, there is about it, or so it has always seemed to me, a certain logical honesty that marks it as the truth.

My grandfather, as you must realize, was born on Earth and came to our planet of Alden in his middle age. He was born into the early days of the Final War when two great blocs of nations loosed upon the Earth a horror and destruction that can scarcely be imagined. During the days of his youth he took part in this war—as much a part as a man could take, for in truth it was not a war in which men fought one another so much as a war in which machines and instruments fought one another with a mindless fury that was an extension of their makers’ fury. In the end with all his family and most of his friends either dead or lost (I don’t know which and I’m not sure that he did, either), he finally was among that contingent of human beings, a small fraction of the hordes that once had peopled Earth, that went out in the great starships to people other planets.

But the story he told me had nothing to do with either the war or the going out in space, but with an incident that he did not place at all in time and only approximately in space. I have the impression that it happened when he was still a comparatively young man, although I cannot remember now if he actually told me this or if I have conjectured it from some now forgotten details of the tale itself. I freely admit that there are many parts of it that I have forgotten through the years, although the major facts of it are still sharp within my mind.

Through some circumstance which I have now forgotten (if, in fact, he ever told me), my grandfather found himself in what he called a safe zone, a little area, a pocket of geography in which through some happenstance of location with regard to topography or meteorology, the land was less poisoned, or perhaps not poisoned at all by the agents of the war, and where a man might live in comparative safety without the massive protection that was required in other less fortunate areas. I have said he was not specific as to where this place actually had been, but he did tell me that it was at a point where a small river coming from the north flowed into a larger river, the Ohio.

I gained the impression (although he did not tell me, nor did I question him on the point) that my grandfather at the time was not engaged in any actual task or mission, but that once he found the area, quite by accident, he simply stayed on there, taking advantage of the comparative security that it offered. Which, in view of the situation, would have made uncommonly good sense. How long he stayed there altogether, I have no idea nor how long he had been there when the event took place. Nor why, finally, he left. All of which, of course, is extraneous to what actually happened. But, one day, he told me, he saw the ship arrive. There were, at that time, very few air-traveling ships in existence, most of them having been destroyed, and even if there had been, they would have counted, should they be used as such, as very feeble weapons in the war then being waged. And it was, besides, a ship such as he had never seen before. I remember that he told me the manner in which it differed from ships that he had seen, but the details have grown a little fuzzy in my mind and if I tried to set them down, I know I’d get them wrong.

Being a cautious man, as all men must be in those days, my grandfather hid himself as well as he could manage and kept as close a watch as possible upon what was happening.

The ship had landed on the point of one of the hills that stood above the river and once it had settled five robots came out from it and another person that was not a robot—appearing, indeed, to be a man, but my grandfather, from his hiding place, had the feeling that it was not a man, but something with only the outward appearance of a man. When I asked my grandfather why he might have thought this, he was hard put to put a finger on it. It was not the way he walked nor the way he stood nor, later, the way he talked, but there was a strangeness, perhaps a psychic scent, a subconscious triggering of the brain, that told him that this creature that was not a robot was not yet a man.

Two of the robots walked a short distance from the ship and seemed to stand as sentinels, not facing in the same direction all the time, but turning occasionally as if they were studying or sensing the terrain on every side. The rest of them began unloading a large pile of boxes and what appeared to be equipment.

My grandfather thought that he was well hidden. He was crouching in a thicket close beside the stream and was hunkered low against the ground so that his silhouette would have been broken by the branches of the thicket and, besides, it was summertime and the shrubs had leaves. But in a very short time, even before the ship had been completely unloaded, one of the robots working at the unloading left the hilltop and came down the hillside, walking straight toward where my grandfather was hiding in the thicket. He thought at first that it was only a coincidence that the robot should be walking toward him and he stayed very still, even breathing as shallowly as he could.

It was not coincidence, however. The robot must have known exactly where he was. My grandfather always thought that one of the sentinels had somehow spotted him, perhaps by a thermal reading, and, staying on post itself, had passed the information that there was a watcher.

Arriving at the thicket, the robot reached down, grabbed my grandfather by the arm and jerked him out of there, then marched him up the hill.

My grandfather admitted to me that from this point onward his memory was not consecutive. While the time element of what he did remember seemed to be consecutive, not jumbled chronologically, there were gaps for which he could not account. He was convinced that before he was let go or managed to escape (although both of these, too, are conjectured, for at no time, so far as he could recall, did he have the feeling that he was being held captive) an attempt was made to erase the memories of what had happened from his mind. He believed that for a time the memory erasure was effective; it was only after he arrived on Alden that he began, in bits and pieces, to remember what had happened—as if the events had been submerged, pushed deep into his brain, and came pushing back again only after a number of years.

He did remember talking with the man that seemed to him not to be entirely a man, and the impression that he carried with him was that this creature was soft-voiced and not at all unkind, although he could not remember a single thing that was said between them, with one exception. The man (if it were a man) told him, he recalled, that he had come from Greece (there was at that time no country that was known as Greece, but at one time there had been) where he had lived for long—my grandfather remembered clearly that phrase, “for long,” and thought it rather strange that it should be expressed that way. The man also told my grandfather that he had sought out a place where life would not be threatened and thought, from certain measurements or from certain other facts my grandfather did not comprehend, that he had found it there in that place he had landed.

My grandfather also recalled that some of the equipment that had been taken from the ship was employed by the robots to drive a deep shaft into the solid rock which lay beneath the hill and, once the shaft was driven, to hollow out great chambers underground. And once this had been done a small hut, rude on the outside, constructed of timbers and made to look as if it were old and about to tumble down, but its interior well finished to make for comfortable living, was built above the tunnel, which had steps going down to the rock-hewn chambers and a clever trapdoor fixed at the mouth of the tunnel so that, once closed, no one would suspect that it was there.

The boxes which had been unloaded from the ship were carried down into the chambers, except for a few that held furniture and furnishings for the hut atop the tunnel.

When one of the boxes was being carried down the steps into the chambers it slipped out of a robot’s grasp and my grandfather, who, for some reason he does not recall, was in the chamber below, saw it come tumbling down the stairs and hurriedly got out of its way. It was a heavy box, but even so, as it tumbled down the stairs, it began to come apart, to be battered apart by striking on the stones, and by the time it reached the bottom of the steps it had come apart entirely so that all that it contained was either scattered on the steps or spilled out on the chamber’s floor.

There was a great treasure in that box, my grandfather told me—jewel-encrusted pendants and bracelets and rings, all set with shining stones; small wheels of gold with strange markings on them (my grandfather insisted they were gold, although how he could tell a thing was gold by simply looking at it, I do not understand); figurines of animals and birds made of precious metals and set with precious stones; a half a dozen crowns (the kind kings or queens would wear); bags that split open to loose a flood of coins, and many other things, including some vases, all of which were smashed.

The robots came rushing down the stairs to pick up all the treasure that was scattered and behind them came their master and when he reached the bottom of the stairs he paid no attention to all the other things, but stooped and picked up some of the pieces of a shattered vase and tried to fit them back together, but he could not fit them back together, for they had been broken into too many pieces. But from the few pieces that he did fit together, trying to hold all those broken pieces in their proper places, my grandfather saw that the vase had had painted pictures on it, fired into the glaze—pictures of strange men hunting even stranger beasts, or maybe they only seemed stranger because they were so badly done, with no thought of perspective and without the anatomical knowledge that is basic with an artist.

The man (if it were a man) stood there with the broken pieces in his hands and his head was bent above them and his face was sad and a tear rolled down his cheek. My grandfather thought it strange that a man should weep at the sight of a broken vase.

All this time the robots were picking up the stuff and putting it in a pile and one of them went and got a basket and put it all into the basket and carried it off to be stored with all the other boxes in one of the rock-hewn chambers.

But they didn’t get it all, for my grandfather, with no one seeing him, picked up a coin and secreted it about his person and I now will wrap this coin, which he passed on to me, and put it in this envelope …