She looked at me with frightened eyes. “I don’t know why I tell all this,” she said. “I did not intend to tell it. There is no reason I should tell you; no reason you should hear it. The facts-the facts I could tell in just a few sentences, but it seemed that they must be told in context..’.”
I reached and touched her arm. “There are some facts that can’t be stated simply,” I told her. “You are doing fine.”
“You are certain you don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” said Elmer, speaking for me. “I am fascinated.”
“There’s not much more,” she said. “There was a doorway, still intact, leading out of the room into the interior of the house and when I went into this room beyond, I saw that it once must have been a kitchen, although only part of it was there. There was a second story to the house, a part of it still standing, although all the roof was gone, having long since caved in on the rest of the structure. But above the kitchen there was no second story. Apparently the eaves of the house had extended over the kitchen and there was a pile of weathered debris lying along what had been the kitchen’s outside wall, the debris from the caving eaves. I don’t know how I happened to notice it-it was not easily detectable-but extending for a short distance out of one section of the debris was a squareness. It looked wrong; it didn’t have the look of debris. It was dust-covered, as was everything in the house. There was no way to know that it was metal. It had no gleam. I guess it must have been the squareness of it. Debris isn’t square. So I went over and tugged it out. It was a box, corroded, but still intact-the metal at no point had been broken or worn through. I squatted there on the floor beside it and I tried to reconstruct what had happened to it and it seemed to me that at some time it had been tucked away underneath the eaves, up in the attic, and then somehow was forgotten and that it had fallen when the eaves had fallen, perhaps crashing through the kitchen roof, or perhaps, by that time the kitchen had no roof.”
“So that’s the story,” I said. “A box with a treasure clue . . .”
“I suppose so,” she said, “but not quite the way you think. I couldn’t get the box open, so I carried it back to my apartment and got some tools and opened it. There wasn’t much in it. An old deed to a small parcel of land, a promissory note marked paid, a couple of old envelopes with no letters in them, a cancelled check or two, and a document acknowledging the loan of some old family papers to the manuscript department of the university. Not a permanent gift; they were just on loan. The next day I went to Manuscripts and made inquiry. You know how manuscript departments are . . .” “Indeed I do,” I said.
“It took a while, but my status as a graduate student in Earth history and the fact that the papers, after all, were my family’s papers finally did the trick. They expected I simply wanted to study them, but by the time they were produced-I think that they had probably been misplaced and may have been difficult to locate-I was so fed up that I filed notice that I was revoking the loan and walked out with them. Which was no way for a devoted history student to behave, of course, but by that time I’d had it. The department threatened me with court action and if they had started action it would have been a lovely mess for someone to untangle, but they never did. Probably they considered the papers worthless, although how they would have known I had no idea. They were a small batch of papers, pretty small potatoes in a place like that. They had been placed in a single envelope and sealed. There was no evidence they had ever been examined; they were all haphazard and mixed up. If they had been examined, they would have been sorted and labelled, but it was fairly evident the original seal never had been broken. The whole bunch of papers had been simply filed away and forgotten.”
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 Al-den-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