The Thing in the Stone Read online

  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 heaving 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 spoo
r 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.”

  And what, Daniels wondered, if the creature in the stone did not wish for rescue? What if it had deliberately placed itself beneath the stone? What if it simply sought protection and sanctuary? Perhaps, if it wished, the creature could get out of where it was as easily as this other one—or this other thing—had risen from the mound.

  No, it cannot, said the creature squatting on the ledge. I was careless. I went to sleep while waiting and I slept too long.

  And that would have been a long sleep, Daniels told himself. A sleep so long that dribbling soil had mounded over it, that fallen boulders, cracked off the cliff by frost, had been buried in the soil and that a clump of birch had sprouted and grown into trees thirty feet high. There was a difference here in time rate that he could not comprehend.

  But some of the rest, he told himself, he had sensed—the devoted loyalty and the mindless patience of the creature that tracked another far among the stars. He knew he was right, for the mind of that other thing, that devoted star-dog perched upon the ledge, came into him and fastened on his mind and for a moment the two of them, the two minds, for all their differences, merged into a single mind in a gesture of fellowship and basic understanding, as if for the first time in what must have been millions of years this baying hound from outer space had found a creature that could understand its duty and its purpose.

  “We could try to dig it out,” said Daniels. “I had thought of that, of course, but I was afraid that it would be injured. And it would be hard to convince anyone—”

  No, said the creature, digging would not do. There is much you do not understand. But this other proposal that you have, that has great merit. You say you do not have the knowledge of genetics to take this action now. Have you talked to others of your kind?

  “I talked to one,” said Daniels, “and he would not listen. He thought I was mad. But he was not, after all, the man I should have spoken to. In time I could talk with others but not right now. No matter how much I might want to—I can’t. For they would laugh at me and I could not stand their laughter. But in a hundred years or somewhat less I could—”

  But you will not exist a hundred years, said the faithful dog. You are a short-lived species. Which might explain your rapid rise. All life here is short-lived and that gives evolution a chance to build intelligence. When I first came here I found but mindless entities.

  “You are right,” said Daniels. “I can live no hundred years. Even from the very start, I could not live a hundred years, and better than half of my life is gone. Perhaps much more than half of it. For unless I can get out of this cave I will be dead in days.”

  Reach out, said the sparkling one. Reach out and touch me, being.

  Slowly Daniels reached out. His hand went through the sparkle and the shine and he had no sense of matter—it was as if he’d moved his hand through nothing but air.

  You see, the creature said, I cannot help you. There is no way for our energies to interact. I am sorry, friend. (it was not friend, exactly, but it was good enough, and it might have been, Daniels thought, a great deal more than friend.)

  “I am sorry, too,” said Daniels. “I would like to live.”

  Silence fell between them, the soft and brooding silence of a snow-laden afternoon with nothing but the trees and the rock and the hidden little life to share the silence with them.

  It had been for nothing, then, Daniels told himself, this meeting with a creature from another world. Unless he could somehow get off this ledge there was nothing he could do. Although why he should so concern himself with the rescue of the creature in the stone he could not understand. Surely whether he himself lived or died should be of more importance to him than that his death would foreclose any chance of help to the buried alien.

  “But it may not be for nothing,” he told the sparkling creature. “Now that you know—”

  My knowing, said the creature, will have no effect. There are others from the stars who would have the knowledge—but even if I could contact them they would pay no attention to me. My position is too lowly to converse with the greater ones. My only hope would be people of your kind and, if I’m not mistaken, only with yourself. For I catch the edge of thought that you are the only one who really understands. There is no other of your race who could even be aware of me.

  Daniels nodded. It was entirely true. No other human existed whose brain had been jumbled so fortunately as to have acquired the abilities he held. He was the only hope for the creature in the stone and even such hope as he represented might be very slight, for before it could be made effective he must find someone who would listen and believe. And that belief must reach across the years to a time when genetic engineering was considerably advanced beyond its present state.

  If you could manage to surv
ive the present this, said the hound from outer space, I might bring to bear certain energies and techniques—sufficiently for the project to be carried through. But, as you must realize, I cannot supply the means to survive this crisis.

  “Someone may come along,” said Daniels. “They might hear me if I yelled every now and then.”

  He began yelling every now and then and received no answer. His yells were muffled by the storm and it was unlikely, he knew, that there would be men abroad at a time like this. They’d be safe beside their fires.

  The sparkling creature still perched upon the ledge when Daniels slumped back to rest. The other made an indefinite sort of shape that seemed much like a lopsided Christmas tree standing in the snow.

  Daniels told himself not to go to sleep. He must close his eyes only for a moment, then snap them open—he must not let them stay shut for then sleep would come upon him. He should beat his arms across his chest for warmth—but his arms were heavy and did not want to work.

  He felt himself sliding prone to the cave floor and fought to drive himself erect. But his will to fight was thin and the rock was comfortable. So comfortable, he thought, that he could afford a moment’s rest before forcing himself erect. And the funny thing about it was that the cave floor had turned to mud and water and the sun was shining and he seemed warm again.

  He rose with a start and he saw that he was standing in a wide expanse of water no deeper than his ankles, black ooze underfoot.

  There was no cave and no hill in which the cave might be. There was simply this vast sheet of water and behind him, less than thirty feet away, the muddy beach of a tiny island—a muddy, rocky island, with smears of sickly green clinging to the rocks.

  He was in another time, he knew, but not in another place. Always when he slipped through time he came to rest on exactly the same spot upon the surface of the earth that he had occupied when the change had come.