As I sit before my cave or huddle with the rest of my clan around a feeble fire, I often wonder if Scott Marston was returned to Earth in his proper time. Or is he, too, a castaway in some strange time? Does he still live? Did he ever reach the Earth? I often feel that he may even now be searching through the vast corridors of time and the deserts of space for me, his one-time partner in the wildest venture ever attempted by man.
And often, too, I wonder if the walking-stick-man used our time-power machine to return to his native planet. Or is he a prisoner in his own trap, caught within the scope of the great purple globe? And I wonder how large the globe has grown to be.
I realize now that our effort to save the universe was unnecessary so far as the Earth was concerned, for the Earth, moving at its greater time-speed, would already have plunged into extinction in the flaming furnace of the sun before the Creator could have carried out his destructive plans.
But what of those other worlds? What of those other planets which must surely swim around strange suns in the gulf of space? What of the planets and races yet unborn? What of the populations that may exist on the solar systems of island universes far removed from our own?
They are saved, saved for all time; for the purple globe will guard the handiwork of the Creator through eternity.
The Spaceman’s Van Gogh
This story was originally published in the March 1956 issue of Science Fiction Stories, and I believe it’s the same one that Clifford D. Simak wrote in late 1953 and early 1954, using the title “Grail,” which was rejected by several magazines before editor Robert A. W. Lowndes purchased it in June 1955. Although there is no record as to when Cliff’s title was changed, or who made that change, the timing is right—and so is the subject matter of the story, for this is a story about a religious quest.
Cliff Simak’s writings touched on the subjects of religion and faith quite often. This may be the most enigmatic of those references, and the least caustic of Cliff’s comments on religion.
The planet was so unimportant and so far out toward the rim that it didn’t have a name, but just a code and number as a key to its position. The village had a name, but one that was impossible for a human to pronounce correctly.
It cost a lot to get there. Well, not to get there, exactly, for all one did was polt there; but it cost a hunk of cash to have the co-ordinates set up for the polting. Because the planet was so far away, the computer had to do a top-notch job, correct to seven decimal points. Otherwise one took the chance of materializing a million miles off destination, in the depths of space; or if you hit the planet, a thousand or so miles up; or worse yet, a couple hundred underneath the surface. Any one of which would be highly inconvenient, if not positively fatal.
There was no reason in the universe for anyone to go there—except Anson Lathrop. Lathrop had to go there because it was the place where Reuben Clay had died.
So he paid out a pocketful of cash to get himself indoctrinated to the planet’s mores and speech, and a bucketful of cash to get his polting plotted—a two-way job, to get both there and back.
He arrived there just about midday, not at the village exactly, for even seven decimal points weren’t good enough to land him squarely in it—but not more than twenty miles away, as it turned out, and no more than twelve feet off the ground.
He picked himself up and dusted himself off and was thankful for the knapsack that he wore, for he had landed on it and been cushioned from the fall.
The planet, or what he could see of it, was a dismal place. It was a cloudy day and he had trouble making out, so colorless was the land, where the horizon ended and the sky began. The ground was flat, a great plain unrelieved by trees or ridge, and covered here and there by patches of low brush.
He had landed near a path and in this he considered himself lucky, for he remembered from his indoctrination that the planet had no roads and not too many paths.
He hoisted his knapsack firmly into place and started down the path. In a mile or so he came to a signpost, badly weather-beaten, and while he wasn’t too sure of the symbols, it seemed to indicate he was headed in the wrong direction. So he turned back, hoping fervently he had read the sign correctly.
He arrived at the village just as dusk was setting in, after a lonely hike during which he met no one except a strange and rather ferocious animal which sat erect to watch him pass, whistling at him all the while as if it were astounded at him.
Nor did he see much more when he reached the village.
The village, as he had known it would, resembled nothing quite so much as one of the prairie dog towns which one could see in the western part of North America, back on his native Earth.
At the edge of the village he encountered plots of cultivated ground with strange crops growing in them; and working among some of these plots in the gathering darkness were little gnome-like figures. When he stopped and called to them, they merely stared at him for a moment and then went back to work.
He walked down the village’s single street, which was little more than a well-travelled path, and tried to make some sense out of the entrances to the burrows, each of which was backed by a tumulus of the ground dug up in its excavation. Each mound looked almost exactly like every other mound and no burrow mouth seemed to have anything to distinguish it from any of the others.
Before some of the burrows tiny gnome-like figures played—children, he supposed—but at his approach they scuttled rapidly inside and did not reappear.
He travelled the entire length of the street; and standing there, he saw what he took to be a somewhat larger mound, some little distance off, surmounted by what appeared to be some sort of rude monument, a stubby spire that pointed upward like an accusing finger aimed toward the sky.
And that was a bit surprising, for there had been no mention in his indoctrination—of monuments or of religious structures. Although, he realized, his indoctrination would be necessarily skimpy for a place like this; there was not a great deal known of the planet or its people.
Still, it might not be unreasonable to suppose that these gnomes might possess religion; here and there one still found patches of it. Sometimes it would be indigenous to the planet, and in other cases it would be survival transplantations from the planet Earth or from one of the other several systems where great religions once had flourished.
He turned around and went back down the street again and came to a halt in the middle of the village. No one came out to meet him, so he sat down in the middle of the path and waited. He took a lunch out of his knapsack, ate it, and drank water out of the vacuum bottle that he carried, and wondered why Reuben Clay had picked this dismal place in which to spend his final days.
Not that it would be out of keeping with the man. It was a humble place and Clay had been a humble man, known as the “Spaceman’s Van Gogh” at one time. He had lived within himself rather than with the universe which surrounded him. He had not sought glory or acclaim, although he could have claimed them both—at times, indeed, it appeared that he might be running from them. Throughout his entire life there had been the sense of a man who hid away. Of a man who ran from something, or a man who ran after something—a seeking, searching man who never quite caught up with the thing he sought for. Lathrop shook his head. It was hard to know which sort Clay had been—a hunted man or hunter. If hunted, what had it been he feared? And if a hunter, what could it be he sought?