Do not make the mistake of thinking that Cliff Simak was against all religion; rather, he was concerned to point out how easy it was—and how usual—for people to corrupt religious impulses and ideals. It is notable, for instance, that his most sympathetic portrayal of religious ideas, in “The Spaceman’s Van Gogh,” involved a wandering artist who was pursuing a search for his religious ideal—that story, that search, had nothing to do with any ecclesiastical organization. (And if I may go out on a limb, I would suggest that “The Thing in the Stone” seems to hint at an alien version of Christianity’s Good Shepherd story.)
Humans, Cliff Simak said a number of times, seem to have a strong need for faith. But they do not seem to know how to find it, or how to use it if they do. This, he suggested in A Heritage of Stars, resulted in great danger to humans—as an alien character said in that book: “you have always been susceptible to gods.”
And let me close by noting that Cliff occasionally portrayed both aliens and robots as wanting to have souls, as humans do—in fact, those beings seemed to care more about having souls than did humans—almost as if humans, having souls, did not really appreciate them.
In particular, it is notable that in many of Cliff’s stories featuring robots, his robots carried names that seem Biblical to us—was that to illustrate that robots, unlike humans, were religiously innocent? (The only religious person in “All the Traps of Earth,” a minister approached by the robot protagonist for advice, was depicted as ineffectual, confused, and unwilling to commit on a moral issue.)
Humans, in Simak stories, usually seem to resent it when robots want to explore religious notions—in Shakespeare’s Planet, for instance, the three human brains who are running an interstellar ship resent the desire of the robot Nicodemus to offer prayers for humans who died on the journey. Nicodemus was likely named after a figure in the New Testament, a Pharisee and a leader of the Jewish people in the time of Jesus Christ, who was also a member of the Sanhedrin, the high court in Israel—according to the Gospel of John, Nicodemus came to Jesus by night to try to learn if Jesus was the Messiah … in short, Nicodemus was a seeker after the truth.
The Thing in the Stone
Arguably the quintessential Simak story, “The Thing in the Stone,” which first appeared in the March 1970 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction, is exactly the sort a Simak fan of the author’s time would want to see in any new work that came bearing Simak’s name … for it is clear that most who treasured Cliff’s works did not mind if he returned to themes he’d dealt with before; the readers came to see how Cliff phrased it, how he told the story—the next time.
Simak’s mind, like that of Daniels, spent much of his life simply looking at, or remembering, the land he loved. Cliff let that land come alive in his imagination, but Daniels could do more than that.
So, a mind that lived plainly and simply in a quiet, backwater place was able to listen to the emanations from other worlds … from the stars. But he also listened to his heart—and, somehow, he may have caught an echo of divine love.
He walked the hills and knew what the hills had seen through geologic time. He listened to the stars and spelled out what the stars were saying. He had found the creature that lay imprisoned in the stone. He had climbed the tree that in other days had been climbed by homing wildcats to reach the den gouged by time and weather out of the cliff’s sheer face. He lived alone on a worn-out farm perched on a high and narrow ridge that overlooked the confluence of two rivers. And his next-door neighbor, a most ill-favored man, drove to the county seat, thirty miles away, to tell the sheriff that this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars was a chicken thief.
The sheriff dropped by within a week or so and walked across the yard to where the man was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch that faced the river hills. The sheriff came to a halt at the foot of the stairs that ran up to the porch.
“I’m Sheriff Harley Shepherd,” he said. “I was just driving by. Been some years since I been out in this neck of the woods. You are new here, aren’t you?”
The man rose to his feet and gestured at another chair. “Been here three years or so,” he said. “The name is Wallace Daniels. Come up and sit with me.”
The sheriff climbed the stairs and the two shook hands, then sat down in the chairs.
“You don’t farm the place,” the sheriff said.
The weed-grown fields came up to the fence that hemmed in the yard.
Daniels shook his head. “Subsistence farming, if you can call it that. A few chickens for eggs. A couple of cows for milk and butter. Some hogs for meat—the neighbors help me butcher. A garden, of course, but that’s about the story.”
“Just as well,” the sheriff said. “The place is all played out. Old Amos Williams, he let it go to ruin. He never was no farmer.”
“The land is resting now,” said Daniels. “Give it ten years—twenty might be better—and it will be ready once again. The only things it’s good for now are the rabbits and the woodchucks and the meadow mice. A lot of birds, of course. I’ve got the finest covey of quail a man has ever seen.”
“Used to be good squirrel country,” said the sheriff. “Coon, too. I suppose you still have coon. You a hunter, Mr. Daniels?”
“I don’t own a gun,” said Daniels.
The sheriff settled deeply into the chair, rocking gently.
“Pretty country out here,” he declared. “Especially with the leaves turning colors. A lot of hardwood and they are colorful. Rough as all hell, of course, this land of yours. Straight up and down, the most of it. But pretty.”
“It’s old country,” Daniels said. “The last sea retreated from this area more than four hundred million years ago. It has stood as dry land since the end of the Silurian. Unless you go up north, onto the Canadian Shield, there aren’t many places in this country you can find as old as this.”
“You a geologist, Mr. Daniels?”
“Not really. Interested, is all. The rankest amateur. I need something to fill in my time and I do a lot of hiking, scrambling up and down these hills. And you can’t do that without coming face to face with a lot of geology. I got interested. Found some fossil brachiopods and got to wondering about them. Sent off for some books and read up on them. One thing led to another and—”
“Brachiopods? Would they be dinosaurs, or what? I never knew there were dinosaurs out this way.”
“Not dinosaurs,” said Daniels. “Earlier than dinosaurs, at least the ones I found. They’re small. Something like clams or oysters. But the shells are hinged in a different sort of way. These were old ones, extinct millions of years ago. But we still have a few brachiopods living now. Not too many of them.”
“It must be interesting.”
“I find it so,” said Daniels.
“You knew old Amos Williams?”
“No. He was dead before I came here. Bought the land from the bank that was settling his estate.”
“Queer old coot,” the sheriff said. “Fought with all his neighbors. Especially with Ben Adams. Him and Ben had a line fence feud going on for years. Ben said Amos refused to keep up the fence. Amos claimed Ben knocked it down and then sort of, careless-like, hazed his cattle over into Amos’s hayfield. How you get along with Ben?”