in the sound of them, was such as to turn his blood to ice and at the same
time fill him with a disgust and a loathing such as he’d never known
before). _It is regrettable, perhaps, that you are immune to death, for much
as we might detest ourselves for doing it, it would be a kinder course to
discontinue you and would serve better than this course to exact our
purpose, which is to place you beyond all possibility of ever having contact
with any sort of life again.. Here, beyond the farthest track of galactic
intercourse, on this uncharted planet, we can only hope that our purpose
will be served. And we urge upon you such self-examination that if, by some
remote chance, in some unguessed time, you should be freed through ignorance
or malice, you shall find it within yourself so to conduct your existence as
not to meet or merit such fate again. And now, according to our law, you may
speak any final words you wish._
The voice ceased and after a while came another. And while the
terminology was somewhat more involved than Daniels could grasp their idiom
translated easily into human terms.
_Go screw yourself_, it said.
The throbbing deepened and the ship began to move straight up into the
sky. Daniels watched it until the thunder died and the ship itself was a
fading twinkle in the blue.
He rose from his crouch and stood erect, trembling and weak. Groping
behind him for the rock, he found it and sat down again.
Once again the only sound was the lapping of the water on the shore. He
could not hear, as he had imagined that he could, the water against the
shining sphere that lay a hundred feet offshore. The sun blazed down out of
the sky and glinted on the sphere and Daniels found that once again he was
gasping for his breath.
Without a doubt, out there in the shallow water, on the mudbank that
sloped up to the island, lay the creature in the stone. And how then had it
been possible for him to be transported across the hundreds of millions of
years to this one microsecond of time that held the answer to all the
questions he had asked about the intelligence beneath the limestone? It
could not have been sheer coincidence, for this was coincidence of too large
an order ever to come about. Had he somehow, subconsciously, gained more
knowledge than he had been aware of from the twinkling creature that had
perched upon the ledge? For a moment, he remembered, their minds had met and
mingled — at that moment had there occurred a transmission of knowledge,
unrecognized, buried in some corner of himself? Or was he witnessing the
operation of some sort of psychic warning system set up to scare off any
future intelligence that might be tempted to liberate this abandoned and
marooned being? And what about the twinkling creature? Could some hidden,
unguessed good exist in the thing imprisoned in the sphere — for it to have
commanded the loyalty and devotion of the creature on the ledge beyond the
slow erosion of geologic ages? The question raised another: What were good
and evil? Who was there to judge?
The evidence of the twinkling creature was, of course, no evidence at
all. No human being was so utterly depraved that he could not hope to find a
dog to follow him and guard him even to the death.
More to wonder at was what had happened within his own jumbled brain
that could send him so unerringly to the moment of a vital happening. What
more would he find in it to astonish and confound him? How far along the
path to ultimate understanding might it drive him? And what was the purpose
of that driving?
He sat on the rock and gasped for breath. The sea lay flat and calm
beneath the blazing sun, its only motion the long swells running in to break
around the sphere and on the beach. The little skittering creatures ran
along the mud and he rubbed his palm against his trouser leg, trying to
brush off the green and slimy scum.
He could wade out, he thought, and have a closer look at the sphere
lying in the mud. But it would be a long walk in such an atmosphere and he
could not chance it — for he must be nowhere near the cave up in that
distant future when he popped back to his present.
Once the excitement of knowing where he was, the sense of
out-of-placeness, had worn off, this tiny mud-flat island was a boring
place. There was nothing but the sky and sea and the muddy beach; there was
nothing much to look at. It was a place, he thought, where nothing ever
happened, or was about to happen once the ship had gone away and the great
event had ended. Much was going on, of course, that in future ages would
spell out to quite a lot — but it was mostly happening out of sight, down
at the bottom of this shallow sea. The skittering things, he thought, and
the slimy growth upon the rock were hardy, mindless pioneers of this distant
day — awesome to look upon and think about but actually not too
interesting.
He began drawing aimless patterns in the mud with the toe of one boot.
He tried to make a tic-tac-toe layout but so much mud was clinging to his
toe that it didn’t quite come out.
And then, instead of drawing in the mud, he was scraping with his toe in
fallen leaves, stiff with frozen sleet and snow.
The sun was gone and the scene was dark except for a glow from something
in the woods just down the hill from him. Driving sheets of snow swirled
into his face and he shivered. He pulled his jacket close about him and
began to button it. A man, he thought, could catch his death of cold this
way, shifting as quickly as he had shifted from a steaming mudbank to the
whiplash chill of a northern blizzard.
The yellow glow still persisted on the slope below him and he could hear
the sound of human voices. What was going on? He was fairly certain of where
he was, a hundred feet or so above the place where the cliff began — there
should be no one down there; there should not be a light.
He took a slow step down the hill, then hesitated. He ought not to be
going down the hill — he should be heading straight for home. The cattle
would be waiting at the barnyard gate, hunched against the storm, their
coats covered with ice and snow, yearning for the warmth and shelter of the
barn. The pigs would not have been fed, nor the chickens either. A man owed
some consideration to his livestock.
But someone was down there, someone with a lantern, almost on the lip of
the cliff. If the damn fools didn’t watch out, they could slip and go
plunging down into a hundred feet of space. Coon hunters more than likely,
although this was not the kind of night to be out hunting coon. The coons
would all be denned up.
But whoever they might be, he should go down and warn them.
He was halfway to the lantern, which appeared to be setting on the
ground, when someone picked it up and held it high and Daniels saw and
recognized the face of the man who held it.
Daniels hurried forward.
‘Sheriff, what are you doing here?’
But he had the shamed feeling that he knew, that he should have known
from the moment he had seen the light.
‘Who is there?’ the sheriff asked, wheeling swiftly and tilting the
lantern so that its rays were thrown in Daniels’ direction. ‘Daniels,’ he
gasped. ‘Good God, man, where have you been?’
‘Just walking around,’ said Daniels weakly. The answer, he knew, was no
good at all — but how could he tell anyone that he had just returned from a
trip through time?
‘Damn it,’ the sheriff said, disgusted. ‘We’ve been hunting you. Ben
Adams got scared when he dropped over to your place and you weren’t there.
He knows how you go walking around in the woods and he was afraid something
had happened to you. So he phoned me, and he and his boys began looking for
you. We were afraid you had fallen or had been hurt somehow. A man wouldn’t
last the night in a storm like this.’
‘Where is Ben now?’ asked Daniels.
The sheriff gestured down the hill and Daniels saw that two men,
probably Adams’ sons, had a rope snubbed around a tree and that the rope
extended down over the cliff.
‘He’s down on the rope,’ the sheriff said. ‘Having a look in the cave.