Although that is wrong, Lathrop told himself. I do not need the faith. I worked for years with logic and with fact and that is all one needs. If there is other need, it lies in another as-yet-undiscovered factor; we need not go back to faith.
Strip the faith and the mumbo-jumbo from the fact and you have something you can use. As Man long ago had stripped the disbelief and laughter from the poltergeist and had come up with the principle of polting, the fact and principle that moved a man from star to star as easily as in the ancient days he might walk down the street to his favorite bar.
Yet there could be no doubt that for Clay it had not worked that way, that with fact alone he could not have painted as he did, that it took the simple faith and the inner glow of that simple faith to give him the warmth and the dedication to make his paintings what they were.
And it had been the faith that had sent him on his search throughout the galaxy.
Lathrop looked at the painting and saw the simplicity and the dignity, the tenderness and the happiness and the sense of flooding light.
Exactly the kind of light, thought Lathrop, that had been so crudely drawn in the illustrations of those old books he had studied in his course on Earth’s comparative religions. There had been, he remembered, one instructor who’d spent some time on the symbolism of the light.
He dropped the crucifix and put out his hand and picked up some of the twisted tubes of oils.
The painting was unfinished, the gnome had said, because Clay had run out of paint, and there was truth in that, for the tubes were flattened and rolled up hard against the caps and one could see the imprint of the fingers that had applied the pressure to squeeze out the last drop of the precious oils.
He fled across the galaxy, thought Lathrop, and I tracked him down.
Even after he was dead I went on and tracked him down, sniffing along the cold trail he had left among the stars. And I tracked him because I loved him, not the man himself—for I did not know nor have any way to know what kind of man he was—but because I saw within his paintings something that all the critics missed. Something that called out to me. Deny it as I may, it may have been the ancient faith calling out to me. The faith that is missing now. The simple faith that long ago was killed by simple logic.
But he knew Clay now, Lathrop told himself. He knew him by the virtue of the tiny crucifix and by the symbol of the last great canvas and by the crude actuality of the mound that stood at the village end on this third rate planet.
And he knew why it had to be a third rate planet.
For there must be humility—even as in faith there had been humility, as there had never been in logic.
Lathrop could shut his eyes and see it—the somber clouds and the vast dreariness of the wastelands, the moors that swept on to foreverness, and the white figure on the cross and the crowd that stood beneath it, staring up at it, marked for all time by a thing they did not understand, a thing they could not understand, but a thing they had done out of utter kindness for one whose faith had touched them.
“Did he ever tell you,” he asked the gnomes, “where he had been? Where he came from? Where he had been just before he came here.”
They shook their heads at Lathrop. “He did not tell,” they said.
Somewhere, thought Lathrop, where the trees grew like those trees in the painting. Where there was peace and dignity and tenderness—and the light.
Man had stripped the husk of superstition from the poltergeist and had found a kernel in the polting principle. Man had done the same with anti-gravity, and with telepathy, and many other things but he had not tried to strip the husks from faith to find the hidden kernel. For faith did not submit to investigation. Faith stood sufficient to itself and did not admit of fact.
What was faith and what the goal of faith? In the many tongues of ancient Earth, what had been the goal of those who subscribed to faith? Happy hunting ground, valhalla, heaven, the islands of the blest—how much faith, how much could be fact? One would not know unless he lived by faith alone and no being now, or very few, lived entirely by their faith.
But might there not be, in the last great reckoning of galactic life and knowledge, another principle which would prove greater than either faith or fact—a principle as yet unknown, but only to be gained by aeons of intellectual evolution. Had Clay stumbled on that principle, a man who sought far ahead of time, who ran away from evolutionary knowledge and who, by that very virtue, would have grasped no more than a dim impression of the principle-to-come.
Faith had failed because it had been blinded by the shining glory of itself. Could fact as well have failed by the hard glitter of its being?
But abandoning both faith and fact, armed with a greater tool of discernment, might a man not seek and find the eventual glory and the goal for which life had grasped, knowing and unknowing, from the first faint stir of consciousness upon the myriad solar systems?
Lathrop found the tube of white and unscrewed the cap and squeezed the tube and a bit of oil came out, a tiny drop of oil. He held the tube steady in one hand and picked up a brush. Carefully he transferred the color to the brush.
He dropped the tube and walked across the burrow to the painting and squatted down and squinted at it in the feeble light, trying to make out the source of the flood of light.
Up in the left hand corner, just above the horizon, although he couldn’t be entirely sure that he was right.
He extended the brush, then drew it back.
Yes, that must be it. A man would stand beneath the massive trees and face toward the light.
Careful now, he thought. Very, very careful. Just a faint suggestion, for it was mere symbolism. Just a hint of color. One stroke perpendicular and a shorter one at right angle, closer to the top.
The brush was awkward in his hand.
It touched the canvas and he pulled it back again.
It was a silly thing, he thought. A silly thing and crazy. And, besides, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t know how to do it. Even at his lightest touch, it would be crude and wrong. It would be desecration.
He let the brush drop from his fingers and watched it roll along the floor.
I tried, he said to Clay.
Hunch
Although this story features, at least in passing, a number of elements Clifford Simak would return to, time and again, in his stories—drugs from space, the too rapid development of technology, telepathy—the basis of “Hunch” is its exposition of what Cliff described, in various later works (such as the novel Ring Around the Sun), as a new sort of human sense, or perhaps power—the sense of hunch—a kind of new instinct arising in humankind to provide protection from a new kind of danger, arising when ordinary intelligence was not enough.
John W. Campbell Jr., the legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction, took less than two weeks to accept this story after Cliff Simak sent it to him; Campbell paid him $150 and published it in the July 1943 issue of his magazine.
Sadly, this story does not work well; and I have believed for some time that it represents the skeleton of what should have been a longer, better developed, work. I regret that that story never made it into reality.
Hannibal was daydreaming again and Spencer Chambers wished he’d stop. Chambers, as chairman of the Solar Control Board, had plenty of things to worry about without having his mind cluttered up with the mental pictures Hannibal kept running through his brain. But, Chambers knew, there was nothing he could do about it. Daydreaming was one of Hannibal’s habits, and since Chambers needed the spidery little entity, he must put up with it as best he could.